




















* 





























































































DREAMS 

AND 

PREMONITIONS 


/ ,* By 

L.' W. ROGERS 

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THEO BOOK CO. 

2006 North Sayre Avenue 
CHICAGO 







Copyright 1923 
By L. W. Rogers. 


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CONTENTS 


Introduction .... 3 


Chapter I 

The Dreamer .... 

9 

Chapter II 

The Materialistic Hypothesis In¬ 



adequate .... 

19 

Chapter III 

Dreams of Discovery . 

37 

Chapter IV 

Varieties of Dreams . 

55 

Chapter V 

Memories of Astral Experiences . 

65 

Chapter VI 

Help from the Invisibles 

81 

Chapter VII 

Premonitory Dreams . 

93 

Chapter VIII 

Dreams of the Dead . 

125 

Chapter IX 

How to Remember Dreams . 

131 



















PREFACE 


While the chief purpose of this book is to present a 
reasonable explanation of the phenomena of dreams and 
premonitions, a scarcely less important one is to present 
a large number of authenticated cases for study. My 
opportunity for gathering such material has been unu¬ 
sual. For more than eighteen years I have given my time 
almost exclusively to lecturing upon occult themes and 
various phases of psychology. This work has taken me 
almost every year through all parts of the United States 
and I have therefore met large numbers of people who 
are interested in such matters. Thousands of people 
have personal experiences along psychological lines which 
never in any way reach the public. When such persons 
attend a lecture on dreams and premonitions they are 
usually eager for an explanation of their own mystifying 
dreams. I have always followed the plan of requiring 
them to write down their experiences, which insures de¬ 
finiteness and minimizes any tendency toward vagueness. 
Scores of such dreams are of no value (except pos¬ 
sibly to the person who has had the experience) because 
they lack some necessary factor and are therefore incom¬ 
plete. Many others, however, are of the greatest value 
because enough of the dream was remembered to make 
a complete case when verified by physical plane evidence 
which followed sooner or later. 

The value of testimony depends upon the credibility 
of the witnesses who give it. If the witnesses are un- 







known, the facts alleged have but little evidential value. 
In nearly every instance I have been able to obtain 
permission to publish names and addresses. Naturally 
enough people shrink from publicity but they also 
instinctively recognize a public duty in making known 
facts which are of incalculable value to the science of 
psychology as the following letter shows: 

“My dear Mr. Rogers: 

“Today I am mailing to you under separate cover a 
recount of the dream of which I told you when you lec¬ 
tured here. I am inclined to shrink from publicity and I 
also have a growing reluctance to relating personal ex¬ 
periences of this character. However, I do recognize the 
value of these experiences when used as evidence in 
calling attention to truths as yet so little understood by 
the great mass of humanity. It is with this thought that 
I am giving you the details of my dream. ,, 

I wish to heartily thank all those who have been kind 
enough to furnish material and especially to express my 
gratitude to all those who have had the courage to give 
their names as witnesses to truths of such vital importance. 


L. W. ROGERS. 



INTRODUCTION 




Dreams and premonitions are the most common of all 


psychic phenomena, but they are nevertheless but little 
understood. Modern psychology has accumulated an 
immense array of facts which very conclusively show 
that the consciousness of the human being is something 
vaster, deeper and altogether more remarkable than has 
generally been supposed. But just there the 



stop, on the very threshold of great discoveries. They are 


puzzled by the remarkable facts and are baffled in their 
attempts to correlate them and satisfactorily explain 
them. 

The facts that have been collected and verified show 
that while some dreams are fantastic, contradictory and 
illogical, others are not only coherent and logical, but 
present a marvelous depth of wisdom which, when com¬ 
pared to ordinary human knowledge, seems almost like 
omniscience. They sometimes solve problems that are 
impossible of solution by the waking consciousness, and 
frequently actually forecast the future by accurately 
describing an event which has not yet occurred but which 
is to be. Thus people have dreamed of their approaching 
death, or of the death of others, stating exactly the nature 
of the accident that would cause it, and describing in 
detail the scenes of the coming tragedy. Yet again the 
impending event presented to the consciousness in the 
dream state may represent only the most trivial of cir¬ 
cumstances. Sometimes drearrts give warnings about 



4 


Dreams and Premonitions 

dangers that are threatening but of which the waking 
consciousness is wholly oblivious. In other cases a dream 
has enabled one to become a rescuer and lifesaver in 
some approaching disaster. Occasionally in a dream 
accurate knowledge is obtained of some tragedy that is 
occurring at a distance, or of a crime that has been com¬ 
mitted, while again missing people have been located and 
lost objects have been recovered through dreams. 

The truth of these astounding facts is beyond all ques¬ 
tion. The problem is to explain the facts. Modern 
psychology talks rather vaguely of the subconscious mind 
and of the subliminal self, but this really explains noth¬ 
ing. We do not advance toward the understanding of 
a mystery simply by applying to it a new name. What 
is that thing called the subconscious, or the subliminal, 
and what are its powers and its limitations? Unless 
science can satisfactorily answer such questions it has » 
done little indeed toward solving these psychological 
puzzles. 

The most striking characteristic of the recent work 
of writers on dreams is the strong tendency toward a 
purely materialistic interpretation of the phenomena 
observed. Hampered by the wholly inadequate hypothesis 
that dreams are caused either by impressions made on 
the physical senses or by desires of the waking con¬ 
sciousness, they fill their pages with a discussion of 
the class of dreams that may thus be explained and 
carefully avoid the dreams that are really worthy of 
investigation just because they present facts that no such 
hypothesis can dispose of. It is some cause for con¬ 
gratulation, however, that after devoting much space 





Dreams and Premonitions 


5 


to a description of the dreams which illustrate the well- 
known fact that slight external stimuli often cause exag¬ 
gerated brain impressions—as, for example, a drop of 
water on the face causing a dream of a violent rain¬ 
storm—these writers often devote a closing paragraph 
to the admission that neither physical nor mental causes 
are sufficient to account for the dreams that occasionally 
forecast the future. Now, it is precisely those occasional 
dreams which the materialistic hypothesis can not explain I 
that it is important to understand, for they alone can 
give some clue to the real nature of human conscious¬ 
ness. We shall surely learn but little by going many 
times over the beaten path of admitted facts while 
neglecting to look beyond to the unexplored fields so 
full of fascinating possibilities. The merest glance is 
sufficient to show that there are two distinct classes of 
dreams; that one class constitutes a memory, on awaken¬ 
ing, of something that is related to impressions made on 
the physical senses; that the other class clearly has no 
such origin and that, instead of being distorted and fan- 

r 

tastic, such dreams sometimes embody profound wis¬ 
dom or accurate knowledge of future events. These 
two classes of dreams no more arise from the same 
causes than the noise made by the revolving record of 
a phonograph has the same origin as the song of intel¬ 
ligence and emotion that flows from it. The one is 
purely mechanical, while the other is purely mental and 
spiritual, transmitted through a material mechanism. 
And that is the true distinction between the dream aris¬ 
ing from a physical cause and the dream which owes 
its origin to the higher activities of unfettered conscious- 










6 


Dreams and Premonitions 


ness. The one is produced by the mechanism of con¬ 
sciousness—the physical brain and its etheric counter¬ 
part—automatically responding to external stimuli and 
putting together fragmentary brain pictures. The other 
is the result of the activity of the ego impressing the 
physical brain with transcendental truth. 

Psychologists have been slow to give recognition to 
such phenomena as hypnotism, telepathy and clairvoyance, 
but they should not be less willing than the most pro¬ 
gressive of physical scientists to recognize the impor¬ 
tant part the latter plays in occult research. There is 
so much of reliable evidence on record involving the 
use of clairvoyance that it would be almost as much a 
waste of time to argue its existence as to contend that 
there is a state of consciousness known as trance. Those 
who are familiar with the clairvoyant faculty and with 
the remarkable powers of the scientifically trained clair¬ 
voyant, will need no argument to convince them that 
here is a means of ascertaining the truth about the various 
states of consciousness and their relationship to the 
physical mechanism through which they are expressed. 
But it is of secondary importance whether the reality 
of clairvoyance be admitted or denied; for from the 
phenomena clairvoyantly observed and catalogued it is 
possible to construct the hypothesis that will explain the 
facts, and all of the known facts, related to dreams. Any 
hypothesis that can do that, legitimately holds its place, 
and must be regarded as sound until a fact is produced 
that it cannot explain. The method of acquiring the 
knowledge from which a hypothesis is constructed is 
of little importance. The only question to be considered 








Dreams and Premonitions 


7 


is whether the hypothesis can explain the admitted facts. 
On its ability to do that it must stand or fall. 

There is a working hypothesis that logically and sat¬ 
isfactorily explains all the remarkable facts, tragic or 
trivial, presented by dreams and premonitions; that will 
enable us to classify and comprehend them; that will 
assign to each dream neither less nor more importance 
than the facts warrant, and that will give to those inter¬ 
ested in the subject a key to these mysteries of the mind. 
The purpose of the following chapters is to present this 
hypothesis, together with the necessary facts to fully illus¬ 
trate the psychic principles involved in the remarkable 
dreams herein recorded. 



























CHAPTER 1 


THE DREAMER 

Before we can hope to comprehend dreams we must 
understand the nature and constitution of the dreamer. 
We must free ourselves of some of our materialistic 
conceptions and consider the question of what the human 
being really is. It is the popular error of regarding 
man as being nothing more than a physical body and 
brain that has so sadly retarded progress in this field of 
research. The very phenomena with which psychology 
deals should long ago have destroyed such an untenable 
premise, for by that materialistic hypothesis it is utterly 
impossible to account for the facts in hand. 

The work of such scientists as Crookes and Lodge 
and Wallace has finally turned public attention in the 
right direction. They have presented evidence in over¬ 
whelming abundance to show that the consciousness is 
not dependent on the physical body for its continuity; 
that after bodily death the consciousness survives, 
and that during the life of the physical body the con¬ 
sciousness may also function quite independently of it. 
So conclusive are the facts gathered by varied and long- 
continued experiments that Sir Oliver Lodge was led to 
declare in a lecture before the Society For The Advance¬ 
ment of Science that the continent of a new world had 
been discovered, and that already a band of daring inves¬ 
tigators had landed on its treacherous but promising 
shores. 


10 


Dreams and Premonitions 


This new “continent” belongs, of course, to the in¬ 
visible world, and these pioneers of the scientific army 
are not the first to explore it. They are only the van¬ 
guard of the physical scientists. The occult scientists 
were long ahead of them and had explored and studied 
the invisible realms. Naturally enough they hail the 
advent of the physical scientists with the greatest satis¬ 
faction, for they are rapidly confirming what the 
occultists long have taught about the constitution of man. 

It is only when we have fully before us these facts 
about the real nature of man, and understand that he 
is essentially a spiritual being, a minor part only of 
whose energies come into action in the material realms, 
that we shall be able to comprehend the phenomena of 
dreams and premonitions. Let us turn our attention, 
then, to the occult side of the problem and examine the 
working hypothesis that satisfactorily explains the facts. 

This hypothesis is that the human being is an in¬ 
dividualized portion of the universal mind which, in 
turn, is but one expression of the Supreme Being; that 
man is “an image of God” in the very literal sense of 
having potentially within him the attributes, the power 
and the wisdom of the deity to which he is thus so directly 
related; that his evolution is going forward in a world 
that has both its spiritual and physical regions; that he 
is essentially a soul, or center of consciousness, function¬ 
ing through a physical body which is but the temporary 
vehicle of the real man, in the same sense that an auto¬ 
mobile is one’s vehicle, and that this material body— 
which is in reality but the clothing of the soul, as the 


The Dreamer 


11 


glove is the clothing of the hand—is discarded at death 
without in any degree affecting the life and conscious¬ 
ness that has temporarily used it for gaining experience 
in the material realms. Man is, therefore, a soul pos¬ 
sessing a material body that enables him to be conscious 
and active in the physical world. This hypothesis re¬ 
verses the old materialistic conception completely. This 
is man’s temporary life. He existed as an intelligence 
before he came down into these material regions through 
birth in a physical body, and when that body dies he 
resumes his relationship to his home plane, the spiritual 
world. But this spiritual world is not merely a realm of 
thought. It is a world of form and a life of activity, of 
deeper, wider knowledge than the physical; an ethereal 
world, but still a world of thought, of action and of 
enterprise. It is a world of tenuous matter, a huge globe, 
not distant in space but enclosing and interpenetrating 
our own as the ether, postulated by science, surrounds 
and interpenetrates all physical objects. It is sometimes 
called the astral world. This ethereal world as a whole 
naturally has its sub-divisions, but for the purpose of 
understanding the phenomena of dreams it is not neces¬ 
sary to introduce details. It is necessary, however, to 
comprehend the relationship between the physical and 
astral regions, and between the physical and astral por¬ 
tions of the mechanism of consciousness. The relation¬ 
ship of the former is that of a world within a world— 
the astral globe being composed of matter so tenuous 
that it encloses the physical globe, interpenetrates it 
throughout, and extends far beyond it in space. As a 


12 


Dreams and Premonitions 


ball of fibrous matter might be immersed in liquid mat¬ 
ter, saturated with it, and completely surrounded by it, 
so the physical globe is interpenetrated and enveloped 
by the matter of the astral world. The astral world, 
then, is not remote but is here in the midst of us, about 
us, through us and beyond us. 

The relationship of the physical and astral bodies of 
a human being are of a like nature. The tenuous mat¬ 
ter of the astral body is within and without the physical 
body, extending somewhat beyond it, and constituting an 
exact duplicate of it. Of course, neither of these bodies 
is in any sense the man. Both are parts of the com¬ 
plex mechanism through which he manifests himself, 
and the astral body is a higher and fuller expression of 
the man than the physical body is. Indeed, the latter is 
merely the body of action. It is only the instrument of 
the man, which enables him to be present in the physical 
world, while the astral body is that with which he feels 
and through which thought and emotion are sent down¬ 
ward, or outward, into the physical body. The physical 
body has no part in the generation of thought. It is 
merely the means by which thought and emotion are ex¬ 
pressed in the material world. Therefore, thought and 
emotion do not come to an end when the physical body 
is inactive on account of either sleep or death. 

These two encasements of the real man—the physical 
and astral bodies—separate from each other under cer¬ 
tain conditions, the latter being used as a vehicle of con¬ 
sciousness while the former is quiescent. A diver uses 
a boat and a diver’s suit. Both are necessary for the work 


The Dreamer 


13 


he is to do. But he may leave the boat and use only 
the diving suit for a time. The boat served the purpose 
of enabling him to go from point to point on the surface. 
The diving suit enables him to explore a region in which 
the boat is not available. Neither of them is the man. 
They are merely the mechanism that he uses. So it is 
with his visible and invisible bodies. The visible physical 
body may be discarded and the invisible astral body may 
then be used as the vehicle of the consciousness, or soul 
—the man himself—in the more ethereal regions. 

But what are the conditions under which the con¬ 
sciousness withdraws from the physical body and func¬ 
tions through the astral body? One is sleep and the 
other is death. Sleep always indicates the separation of 
the visible from the invisible body. Whether the sleep 
is natural, or is induced by hypnotism or trance, it indi¬ 
cates the separation of the bodies. There can be no such 
separation without sleep and no sleep without such 
separation* Sleep is simply the absence of the man 
from his physical body. That is why it is asleep.^ It is 
not being used by the man. His intelligence is not flow¬ 
ing through it. He is not there. 

But how, then, it may be asked, does the breathing 
continue and the heart beat if the body is without its 
tenant? How does the worm entombed within the 
chrysalis become the butterfly? How do creatures below 
the line of intellect in the evolutionary scale live with¬ 
out thinking? Our physical bodies are not dependent 
upon our intellects. We do not consciously direct the 
beating of the heart nor the processes of digestion dur- 


14 


Dreams and Premonitions 


ing the waking hours. The activities necessary to the 
life and well-being of the body go on until its death 
whether we think of them or do not, and whether the con¬ 
sciousness is functioning through the body or is with¬ 
drawn from it. 

Death is the other cause of the separation of the 
astral body from the physical body, and the only differ¬ 
ence between sleep and death is that in sleep the man 
withdraws his consciousness temporarily from the phy¬ 
sical body and later returns to it. The act of withdraw¬ 
ing is what we call falling asleep. Returning is what 
we call awakening. The instant the consciousness is 
withdrawn the physical body is asleep. That is what 
sleep is—the separation of the astral body from the 
physical body. The soul, the real man, has temporarily 
laid down his instrument of activity in the visible world. 
It is then like a vacant house with drawn curtains until 
its absent tenant returns to it, and begins to send his 
consciousness through it. During his absence he has 
been using his astral body as his vehicle of conscious¬ 
ness, just as the diver temporarily abandoned his boat 
for his diving suit. 

In death the consciousness has been withdrawn from 
the physical body for the last time. The absence is 
permanent. The body has worn out or has been injured 
beyond the possibility of repair. The soul, the real 
man, cannot return to it because it no longer serves the 
purpose for which it came into existence. It is a worth¬ 
less machine, worn out through long use, broken sud¬ 
denly by violence or wasted slowly by disease, as the 


The Dreamer 


15 


case may be. During all the temporary absences called 
sleep there was a magnetic connection between the astral 
and physical bodies of the man. But when death 
comes the tie between the soul and the material body 
is broken and there is no possibility of returning to it. 
And that is,, what death is—the severing of the bond 
between the visible and invisible bodies. The physical 
body is then dead and disintegration begins. But the 
real man, the individual consciousness, has not ceased 
to live. He has merely lost the instrument that connected 
him with the material world, and which enabled him to 
move about in it and be known to others there. He is 
physically dead because he has lost the physical body. 
He is not mentally and emotionally dead because he has 
not lost that part of his mechanism of consciousness 
which is the seat of thought and emotion. The physical 
body enabled him to express his life in the visible world 
but it was no more the man than a phonograph is the 
person who sings into it. If the phonograph is broken 
the only change to the singer is that he has lost the in¬ 
strument of his expression, not his consciousness. 

It may, at first thought, seem grotesque to speak of 
a man as possessing more than one body. Being to many 
an unaccustomed thought it may sound as bizarre as 
to say that a person may occupy two houses at one and 
the same time. But nevertheless the idea represents 
scientific accuracy. As a matter of fact we do live in two 
houses whenever we live in any house. Science asserts 
that every physical atom has its duplicate in etheric mat- 
ter, by which it is surrounded and interpenetrated. Every 


16 


Dreams and Premonitions 


building, every brick and board, has its counterpart in 
unseen matter. The immobile mountains, the flowing 
streams, the swaying tree-tops, the waving fields of grain, 
the placid lakes and the ocean tempest tossed, all have 
their exact counterparts in the invisible matter that repro¬ 
duces the world in phantom form. 

So much science is able to demonstrate and the very 
nature of this truth compels us to postulate still other 
and rarer grades of matter than the ether. It is the 
next rarer grade of invisible matter that the scientists - 
almost brought within the catalog of ascertained facts by 
discovering the electron and proving that the atom is a 
minute universe in itself. 

When we hold a pebble in the hand we do not see 
all of the pebble. It consists of its visible and invisible 
parts, and sight and touch can deal with but one of them. 
The trained clairvoyant would see what others see and 
also the grades of subtile matter surrounding it and inter¬ 
penetrating it. Now, since this surrounding and inter¬ 
penetrating relationship of seen and unseen matter is 
as true of one object as another, the physical body is no 
exception. Duplicating it exactly in form and feature 
is the tenuous matter of a rarer grade, surrounding and 
permeating it. The consciousness functions through these 
two bodies as one complex instrument, yet they are 
separable. An aeroplane is equipped for movement both 
on the ground and through the air. It may lose its 
wheels without losing its power to soar. It has merely 
lost that part of its mechanism that enabled it to operate 
in connection with the grosser element. So with man. 


The Dreamer 


17 


When he loses his physical body it limits his field of 
activities but does not change the man himself nor 
impair his ability to function elsewhere. 

The dreamer, then, is vastly more than a physical 
body with a mysterious brain. We are not dealing with 
a machine, a portion of which “secretes thought as the 
liver secretes bile,” as a scientist of a past generation 
ventured to guess, but with a spiritual being functioning 
through a material body containing a brain that is at 
once an instrument of thought and a limitation of con¬ 
sciousness ; for if thought and emotion have a super¬ 
physical origin a large percentage of their original energy 
must be expended in attaining material expression. There¬ 
fore the dreamer, in his waking hours, is expressing but 
a faint reflection of his true consciousness, which is 
necessarily limited by its material media. As a fragment 
of the universal mind he possesses within his unfettered 
self a wisdom wholly foreign to his physical existence. 
The home plane of his being is above the limitations of 
those conditions of consciousness which we know as 
time and space. He is temporarily blinded by matter 
while functioning through the material body. He iden¬ 
tifies himself with it and loses conscious connection with 
his higher estate. But when he escapes the limitations 
of the physical body, either in sleep or in death, and 
begins to function through his astral body he is a stage 
nearer to reality and has, in some degree, a transcendental 
grasp of human affairs. In the case of sleep he returns, 
at the moment of awakening, from the higher state of 
consciousness to the lower level of physical plane con¬ 
sciousness and is again subjected to the limitations of the 



18 


Dreams and Premonitions 


physical brain. But the physical body has its counter¬ 
part in astral matter and it is the astral form in which 
the consciousness, the real man, has been functioning 
during the hours of sleep. His experiences during that 
time have given rise to thoughts and emotions which 
are not impressed upon the physical brain because it has 
had no part in them. They have set up vibrations only 
in the subtiler portions of the mechanism of conscious¬ 
ness. Ordinarily upon the re-uniting of the astral and 
physical bodies the vibrations of the tenuous astral mat¬ 
ter are not communicated to the matter of the physical 
brain and there is no memory of what has occurred dur¬ 
ing the period of slumber. Occasionally, however, there 
is a rare combination of physical, astral and mental con¬ 
ditions that makes memory possible and the recollection 
is called a dream. But all memories of the sleeping 
hours are not recollections of astral events and it is only 
after some effort and experience that it becomes possi¬ 
ble to distinguish between the memories which represent 
the adventures of the soul in the astral region and the 
brain pictures caused by the automatic activity of the 
physical brain, in which external stimuli sometimes play 
a most dramatic part. Nevertheless the two distinct 
classes of dreams, those caused by automatic physiological 
activity, occasionally associated with excitation outside 
the body, and those which represent the experiences of 
the man himself in the ethereal realms, are, as analysis 
will show, as different in their characteristics as are 
the causes which produce them. 


CHAPTER II 


THE MATERIALISTIC HYPOTHESIS 
INADEQUATE 

Some modern writers have labored mightily to show 
that dreams may be explained by a purely materialistic 
hypothesis. Coincidence has been put under such stress 
as to raise the accidental to the dignity of the casual. Tele¬ 
pathy has been relied upon to cover a multitude of lame 
conclusions. To explain strange facts we have been 
given far-fetched solutions that require more credulity 
for their acceptance than any fairy tale of our child¬ 
hood days. A writer will cheerfully set out to give a 
satisfactory material solution for any and all dreams and 
will explain that the reason why a certain lady dreamed 
of the correct number of an unknown address was possi¬ 
bly because she had seen that particular number on the 
paging of a book the day before! Another relates the 
story of a dinner party being interrupted by one of their 
number being suddenly impressed with the feeling that 
he must go immediately to a barn not far away; that an 
undefinable “something” was wrong there. He had no 
idea what it might be but he had an inner impulsion 
with the barn as a destination. It was an unreasonable 
but irresistible impulse to go immediately to examine 
the barn, and apparently for no reason at all. None of 
the others shared the feeling but upon reaching the barn 
they were astonished to find that a small blaze had started 


20 


Dreams and Premonitions 


in some unknown way and there would have been a 
conflagration but for their timely arrival. 

Here we have a phenomenon not easily explained. 
But it does not trouble the writer who presents it in 
order to show how simple it all is. “He smelled the 
smoke!” triumphantly exclaims this Sherlock Holmes 
of psychic riddles. And when, in such a case, it is shown 
that the feeling of anxiety positively antedated the start¬ 
ing of the blaze by some minutes he falls back on the 
final resort of the “subconscious self,” quite overlooking 
the fact that that is begging the question and really ex¬ 
plains nothing. 

In one of the leading monthly periodicals a well-known 
psychologist for a time conducted a department on psy¬ 
chology and the announced purpose was to explain away 
puzzling psychic experiences in daily affairs. The 
thoughtful reader will find it difficult to believe that the 
people who propounded the questions were satisfied with 
the answers but they are apparently the best that the 
materialistic school of psychology is prepared to give 
them. However, if the “solutions” serve no other pur¬ 
pose they are at least useful in illustrating the trivial ar¬ 
guments presented and the astounding conclusions 
reached. 

It was not so long ago that the fact of telepathy was 
struggling for slight recognition and was knocking al¬ 
most unheard at the door of modern psychology. Slow¬ 
ly its status changed from the condition of an outcast 
to tardy recognition of its usefulness, and the rapidly 
accumulating mass of psychic facts is likely to raise it 
soon to the importance of becoming the last hope of the 



The Materialistic Hypothesis Inadequate 21 

ultra-materialist. Our psychologist of the periodical 
above mentioned had not proceeded far with his depart¬ 
ment until he opened his monthly digest with this declara¬ 
tion : 

“In the many letters received by me since I began 
to discuss psychical problems in these columns, one 
fact has been increasingly evident—the actuality of tele¬ 
pathy or thought transference. Even if I had started 
with a disbelief in telepathy—which I assuredly did not 
—I could not have retained my skepticism after studying 
the letters my readers have sent me. 

“From every State in the Union, from Canada, Eng¬ 
land, France, and other European countries, has come 
evidence, testifying with cumulative force that in some 
mysterious way one mind can in truth communicate di¬ 
rectly with another mind though half the world apart.” 

Without the fact of telepathy the attempt of the psy¬ 
chologist to explain some of the dreams submitted would, 
indeed, put him in hard case; for even with telepathy, 
and telepathy strained and twisted out of all semblance 
to its legitimate self, his hypothesis is still hopelessly weak 
and utterly inadequate. 

Telepathy—the communication between mind and 
mind without material means—has been demonstrated 
by the simple method of one person acting as the “sender” 
and being handed a written word or a simple drawing 
upon a piece of paper supplied by the experimenter, who 
has himself at that moment conceived it. The “sender” 
fixes his attention upon it. At that moment another per¬ 
son who is acting as the “receiver,” stationed at a dis¬ 
tance of, let us say, a hundred miles, waiting with 


22 


Dreams and Premonitions 


pencil in hand, reproduces the word or drawing with more 
or less accuracy as the case may be. By the hypothesis 
laid down in Chapter I, the explanation is as simple as 
wireless telegraphy. Thought is a force as certainly as 
electricity is a force. When a mental picture is formed 
in the mind, grades of subtile matter rarer than that 
of the brain are thrown into vibration and reproduce 
themselves in the mind of the “receiver” after the fash¬ 
ion of the vibrations initiated by the sending instrument 
of wireless telegraphy. But telepathy has its limitations 
as certainly as telegraphy has. A thought, a feeling, a 
mood, an emotion may be telepathically communicated 
from one person to another and apparently regardless of 
any intervening space which the limits of the earth can 
impose. In the case of people with minds well developed 
and capable of forming strong and clear mental images 
a more extended communication would conceivably be 
possible. The scientific experiments thus far made have, 
however, resulted in no such accomplishment. The most 
that can be said to be proved for telepathy is that com¬ 
munication is a truth of nature and that it may occur 
in cases where, although the parties are widely separated, 
there is either strong effort to communicate or where 
there is a bond of sympathy between them. When peo¬ 
ple are together and their minds are running along the 
same lines it may occur under the most ordinary circum¬ 
stances. But we must not overlook the part played by 
facial expression in reading the thoughts of others, nor 
of the physical conditions that shape thought in a common 
mold as, for example, when your friend rises to open a 
window before you can utter the request that is in your 


The Materialistic Hypothesis Inadequate 23 

mind. He may have thought of it because he was moved 
by your thought or only because he, too, was uncom¬ 
fortable. There are other cases not at all susceptible 
to such explanation. One often gets telepathically the 
thought of another who is near him but it is partial 
and fragmentary. He does not get a complete inventory 
of the content of the other’s mind. So far as casual 
experience and scientific experiment have gone it has 
been made fairly clear that while telepathy is common it 
marks out an extremely narrow field in psychological 
phenomena. Deprived of the connecting link of personal 
presence and conversation, or ties of close sympathy, it 
seems to be effective only when the thought is stimulated 
by some powerful emotion like sudden and serious ill¬ 
ness, accident or death. When we go beyond that we 
are in the realm of assumption and speculation. To as¬ 
sume that because one mind can catch a thought or emo¬ 
tion from another telepathically, one person therefore gets 
from another’s mind without effort or desire all the de¬ 
tails relating to something that individual has seen or 
heard, is as absurd as to assume that because wireless 
telegraphy brings a message that has passed through 
the mind of the sending operator the message might in 
some mysterious way give a knowledge of everything 
else known to that individual. And yet just such fan¬ 
tastic and groundless assumption is what our psychologist 
is forced to, in the effort to explain some of the cases sub¬ 
mitted. Here is an example: 

“A trifle over a year ago, contemplating a trip East, 
I decided to rent my furnished six-room apartment. It 
was taken by two young ladies, one employed, the other 


24 


Dreams and Premonitions 


the homekeeper. Some three weeks later I had the most 
distressing - dream. I thought I went over to my apart¬ 
ment, only to find everything in most dreadful confusion. 
The sun porch had been converted into a temporary bed¬ 
room, and in my own bedroom, where usually stood the 
dressing table (now on the porch) stood a small iron 
bed, white, with everything upset and dirty. In my 
dream I also saw that the young ladies had taken in as 
boarders a married couple with two little ones. Well, 
I immediately forgot the dream, but several nights later 
had the same dream again. Imagine my surprise at learn¬ 
ing after my return home, that just what I had dreamed 
had actually occurred, even to the little white bed.” 

Then follows the psychologist’s explanation. He says: 

“On the facts as stated this dream must be regarded 
as telepathic. There is, of course, a possibility that the 
dreamer, before leaving home, had, without being aware 
of it, heard her prospective tenants talking about their 
plans for taking in boarders, changing the furniture, etc. 
The dream would then be merely the emergence of a 
subconscious memory.” 

The theory of telepathy in this case is so obviously 
inadequate that our psychologist hastens to add that 
there is another possible explanation and then falls back 
upon the safe vagueness of the subconscious memory. 
But is his explanation even within the realm of proba¬ 
bility? There may be the possibility, he argues, that she 
had heard talk of taking in boarders and changing the 
furniture! But even if that had happened and even if 
we were to grant some connection between that fact 
and the dream, how could she have obtained from the 


The Materialistic Hypothesis Inadequate 25 

knowledge that they would take boarders the fact that 
the boarders would be a man and his wife and two little 
children? and if we grant that she unconsciously and in 
some mysterious way absorbed the information that they 
would change the furniture, how could that possibly en¬ 
able her to know that her dressing table would be moved 
to the porch and that a small white iron bed would be 
put in its place? 

There is no evidence, however, that she had heard 
such conversation, or had the slightest hint that any such 
thing was contemplated. Indeed, there is good ground 
for the belief that it was all a most disagreeable surprise 
to her. She describes the discovery as a “most distress¬ 
ing dream. ,, The reasonable assumption from the lan¬ 
guage employed by her is that she was astonished and 
annoyed and was very much disappointed in her tenants. 
Clearly neither of the explanations of the psychologist 
really explains this dream. 

Our psychologist turns his attention to premonitions 
with no better results. One of his correspondents sub¬ 
mits to him the following experience: 

“One Sunday evening during the ‘Maine rum war’ 
the pastor of my church announced that Dr. Wilbur F. 
Krafts, then touring the State in the interests of prohibi¬ 
tion, would speak the next day at noon in the public 
square. Though interested like many others in keeping 
the prohibitory law, it was by that time, I suppose, ‘on 
my nerves/ and I wanted to hear no more on the subject 
and left the church as soon as possible. That night I 
dreamed of returning from my work at noon, hearing 
the sound of music—‘Marching Through Georgia’—and 


26 


Dreams and Premonitions 


going to the public square. There I saw a crowd sur¬ 
rounding a group of three or four men. Near the speaker 
stood my pastor, who, noticing me, made his way through 
the crowd and spoke to me. At that point I awoke. 

“On the forenoon following I had no recollection of 
my dream and at noon heard music, evidently in the pub¬ 
lic square. As I started for the square I noticed that 
the air was ‘Marching Through Georgia.* Before I 
reached the square the music changed to another air as 
in my dream, which I then remembered. In the square 
I recognized in Dr. Krafts the speaker of my dream. 
My pastor was near him and, noticing me, came to me 
with a message from his wife. Until then I had never 
seen Dr. Krafts, nor heard anything in particular about 
him, never had him in mind at all and do not think I 
had ever seen his picture.” 

To this the psychologist replies: 

“Some psychologists, contrasting the complete for¬ 
getfulness until noon with the vividness and fullness of 
the dream detail recalled by happenings in the square, 
would insist that the whole dream memory was an un¬ 
conscious fabrication. But the likelihood is that since, 
as she says, the prohibition campaign was on her nerves, 
she did dream something about the meeting to take place 
the next day. She 'may easily have dreamed of Dr. 
Krafts himself for, in spite of her disclaimer, it would be 
strange indeed if she had never seen a newspaper or 
poster portrait of him printed in connection with the 
campaign. If she did dream of Dr. Krafts she would be 
all the more likely, because of her surprise at recognizing 
him in the square, to fuse the true details of her dream 


The Materialistic Hypothesis Inadequate 27 

memory with details of which she had not really 
dreamed.” 

Perhaps nothing could appear more absurd to one 
who has such an experience than to call it “unconscious 
fabrication.” If that is what such evidence would be 
called by “some psychologists” they have certainly not 
been qualified for their work by any personal experience. 
One of the outstanding facts about such dreams is their 
vividness and lifelike reality. That she did not remem¬ 
ber the dream during the forenoon is no evidence what¬ 
ever against its reality. What followed was perfectly 
natural. When she heard the same airs played by the 
band in the same sequence and saw the same figures she 
had seen in the dream it is impossible that she could fail 
to recall it. To say that she may have “fused” the true 
details of her dream with the details of the events that 
followed is a far-fetched possibility with no relationship 
to probability, and a theory is weak indeed that must rely 
on such an assumption. Akin to it is the hazard that 
she must have seen Dr. Kraft’s picture and forgotten it. 
Yet if seeing his forgotten picture had enabled her to 
identify the man, would not seeing the man enable her to 
remember having previously seen his picture? But the 
identity of the speaker, which is so unsatisfactorily ex¬ 
plained, is of no more importance than the movements of 
the pastor. In the dream he notices her, comes through 
the crowd and speaks to her, at which point she awakens. 
In the events of the next day he does precisely the same 
thing. There is apparently no sound reason whatever for 
doubting any part of the evidence. 



I 


* 


28 Dreams and Premonitions 

In another premonitory dream the account runs as 
follows: 

“My mother, an Englishwoman and a deeply religious 
woman, dreamed she saw my sister lying dead, with 
two doctors in white beside her. My mother was greatly 
distressed over this, but as the weeks passed she grad¬ 
ually forgot it, until one day, several months after the 
dream, my sister had to go to Dublin for a slight opera¬ 
tion. Just before commencing they allowed mother to 
see her and her dream was before her. She recognized it 
instantly. My sister was unconscious and on the operat¬ 
ing table, while a doctor stood on each side.” 

Which the psychologist thus explains: 

“And, no doubt, at the time of the dream the sister’s 
health was such that her mother would consciously or 
subconsciously be aware that an operation might some 
day be necessary. Out of this conscious or subconscious 
knowledge the dream would logically develop, featuring 
the attending physicians in the regular costume of the 
operating room.” 

Suppose that for the sake of the argument we were 
to grant the overworked theory of “subconscious knowl¬ 
edge,” and then for good measure were to throw in the 
admission of the assumption—for which there is no fact 
in evidence—that the daughter’s health was bad at the 
time of the dream. How, even then, can the dream be 
thus satisfactorily explained? If the mysterious “sub¬ 
conscious knowledge” furnished the information that 
there would be an operation, then what put two doctors 
in the dream instead of one, or three? When relatives 
are admitted to see patients before an operation they 


The Materialistic Hypothesis Inadequate 29 

usually see them just before the ether is administered. 
In this instance there must have been some unexpected 
delay in arriving or some other miscalculation which 
changed the ordinary course. How did it happen that in 
the dream the mother saw her daughter apparently dead, 
lying between the two doctors, with which details the 
later event exactly corresponded? 

If the dream in this case was the waking memory of 
the ego’s dramatization of approaching events it is easy 
to understand why the mother thought her daughter was 
dead. Having taken the anaesthetic she appeared to lie 
dead. But if the dream came because the mother was “con¬ 
sciously or subconsciously aware that an operation would 
sometime be necessary” why did she not dream that her 
daughter was not dead but had merely taken ether? 

None of the explanations of our psychologist will pass 
the test of analysis. No thoughful person can fail to 
observe that, in almost every case, he is obliged to assume 
facts that are not in evidence and that he proceeds to build 
up an imaginary structure and surround the case with 
conditions which there is no reason to believe really exist. 
When the facts which are in evidence are antagonistic 
to his hypothesis he calmly ignores the facts and holds 
that the witnesses are mistaken! He is a poor attorney 
who could not win a case were he permitted to be judge 
and jury as well as advocate. 

The ease with which our psychologist can dispose 
of a difficulty is well illustrated by the following case 
and explanation: 

“My mother tells the following story. When I was 
several months old she one night put me to sleep in my 


32 


Dreams and Premonitions 


ployment of purely physical factors, special conditions are 
assumed, witnesses are discredited, facts are ignored, and 
in the name of science conclusions are drawn that repre¬ 
sent nothing less than the most arrant nonsense. 

With the vague, elusive and undefined “subconscious¬ 
ness” to fall back upon in an emergency, there is always 
a safe retreat. And that assurance may be doubly sure 
our psychologist says: 

“Let me urge my readers never to forget that any¬ 
thing which has ever got into the mind, may, under special 
conditions, be externalized as an hallucination, or may 
crop up into the recollection in the form of a dream.” 

When we add to that declaration the privilege of 
assuming the “special conditions” that may be necessary 
to make any particular case fit the materialistic interpre¬ 
tation, it certainly ought to go a long way in helping 
our psychologist to harmonize his theory with the facts! 

There is no danger of defeat in the arena of logic 
if there is some byway permitting retirement beyond the 
reach of logic at any critical moment. Long years ago 
when the idea of evolution was getting a foothold in the 
thought of western civilization I knew an estimable and 
pious old gentleman whose mind was somewhat scientific 
in trend but ultra-orthodox in faith. He would not deny 
a scientific fact or principle, as he understood it, but he 
clung tenaciously to the old idea of the literal interpre¬ 
tation of the Bible which the evolutionary hypothesis 
was invalidating, and when he was asked to explain how 
a certain thing could be so and so, as alleged, when it was 
in violation of the scientific facts he would reply, “ Well, 
it is the Lord’s way.” No matter what altogether im- 


The Materialistic Hypothesis Inadequate 33 

possible or utterly contradictory matter had to be ex¬ 
plained it was met with the solemn declaration that “it 
is the Lord’s way.” And all the time the old gentleman 
evidently believed that to be conclusive, and appeared to 
be serenely unconscious of the fact that anything imag¬ 
inable can be justified by the man who merely has to 
declare “it is the Lord’s way.” 

Our psychologist is equally safe. His line of retreat 
to “subconsciousness” is always open. If a dream ac¬ 
curately forecasts the future it is because the dreamer 
knew of some fact which, by the wonderful alchemy 
of the subconsciousness, supplied the future details. If one 
is in a strange country which he has never before visited, 
and suddenly becomes aware that it is all as familiar as 
his own garden, and then proceeds to describe to his 
friends what lies ahead along the road, it is because he 
has somewhere had a glimpse of a picture—and forgot¬ 
ten it—and that wonderful subconsciousness accounts 
for the rest. If one is moving in the darkness toward a 
precipice a yard away, in perfect ignorance of its exist¬ 
ence, and feels himself suddenly bodily pushed back¬ 
ward when there is no living being near him, why, it’s 
a hallucination representing ideas latent in his conscious¬ 
ness. If you are meandering along a forest path, and are 
suddenly seized with an impulse to leave it for no imag¬ 
inable reason, and come back to it a few feet further on, 
and then discover that you thus probably escaped death, 
it is because your subconsciousness managed the matter. 
You saw or heard the snake, but didn’t know it, or you 
would have known why you turned aside. If you have 
a dream of future events as they afterward really tran- 


34 


Dreams and Premonitions 


spire, it is only a coincidence unless the details are all 
in agreement with the dream, and if they are then you 
didn’t dream them; not because you are consciously 
fabricating, but because the mysterious subconsciousness 
that previously saved you from snakes is now leading 
you to “fuse” the details and appear in the role of an 
unconscious liar; and, finally, if you have a dream that 
presents facts which cannot possibly be explained by the 
material hypothesis, you are simply mistaken about it— 
you only thought you had a dream, because if you really 
had had such a dream it would not be in agreement with 
the materialistic theory! 

It is, of course, true that some dreams and apparent 
premonitions can be explained by material facts. It is 
equally true that a great many dreams cannot be thus 
explained. A close study of them will at once make this 
apparent and show the utter inadequacy of the materialis¬ 
tic hypothesis. Any hypothesis is serviceable only so 
long as it can explain the known facts. The moment it 
fails to explain an established fact it falls to the ground, 
no matter how many other facts it may have satisfactorily 
explained. The belief that the earth was flat and station¬ 
ary was at one time general. That theory satisfactorily 
explained the known facts. But when other facts were 
discovered that could not be thus explained the theory in¬ 
stantly collapsed. The only question involved was wheth¬ 
er there were really new facts to be dealt with. The 
world discovered that it had been considering only part 
of the facts. Additional facts destroyed the old hypothe¬ 
sis ; and that is precisely the case in the matter here under 
discussion. The facts have not all been considered. They 


The Materialistic Hypothesis Inadequate 35 

have either been completely ignored or have been waived 
aside with the assumption that the most trivial and far¬ 
fetched explanations are sufficient to dispose of them. 

The dreams that are utterly beyond explanation by 
the materialistic hypothesis constitute evidence as reliable 
as the others, and are furnished by witnesses who differ 
in no way from those who have furnished the details 
of the few dreams that involve no superphysical factors. 
A glance at some of these dreams will show how hope¬ 
lessly the old theory breaks down in their presence. Many 
of them are dreams of discovery which bring to light 
that which is lost and under circumstances that eliminate 
telepathy and vague hints at subconscious possibilities. 
Others are in the nature of warnings of impending dan¬ 
ger which does not exist at the time the warning is given. 
Sometimes they enable the dreamer after awakening to 
give life-saving assistance to other people. The fact that 
some dreams can be fully and satisfactorily explained 
on purely material grounds does not throw a single ray 
of light upon the mystery of other dreams in which the 
dreamer obtains detailed knowledge of what transpired 
during the night at a distance, nor on the dream that fore¬ 
shadows an approaching tragedy. 


CHAPTER III 


DREAMS OF DISCOVERY 

Most people who are able to give testimony upon 
such matters are unwilling to be personally mentioned 
for a double reason; they dread the possible ridicule of 
the unthinking, and they dislike the task of replying to 
letters of inquiry which the publicity of the facts may 
call out. Fortunately there are some who, in the inter¬ 
est of truth, are willing to be witnesses for it regardless 
of the unpleasantness involved. The extremely interest¬ 
ing and remarkable dream selected to open this chapter 
was related to me by Mrs. Reeves Snyder, a well-known 
resident of Springfield, Ohio, with permission to use her 
name. Her mother had died rather suddenly after a 
short illness. When the time arrived for adjusting the 
financial accounts it was discovered that certain bonds 
were missing. They were not in the strong box at the 
bank where they were supposed to be, nor had any mem¬ 
ber of the family the slightest knowledge that could lead 
to their recovery. They well knew that they would not 
have been disposed of without their consent and advice. 
Every conceivable nook and cranny of the house was 
searched and re-searched, but the mystery of the missing 
bonds remained unsolved. The loss was a large one, and 
as time passed without developing the slightest clue to 
the missing property the daughter’s anxiety grew. 

One night Mrs. Reeves Snyder dreamed. She found 


38 


Dreams and Premonitions 


herself in the presence of her dead mother, who smilingly 
said, “Don’t worry any more about those bonds, you’ll 
find them in the morning. I had them at the house just 
before I was taken ill, and had them in my hand when 
I went up to the garret floor, and laid them aside while 
busy there. I forgot them when leaving—and then came 
the illness and confusion that followed. They are there, 
and you will find them in an old tomato can, covered with 
a board, near the end of the large black trunk.” 

Awakening, the dreamer related the startling story to 
her husband, who was wholly incredulous. But she her¬ 
self had not the slightest doubt that she had seen and 
conversed with her recently departed mother. We can 
easily imagine the impatience with which she awaited the 
coming of morning, and with which she hurried to her 
mother’s late residence at the earliest possible moment. 
As she approached the house her father and sister ap¬ 
peared on the veranda. Now it seems that Mrs. Reeves 
Snyder had the reputation of being a dreamer of remark¬ 
able dreams, and her father, who was strongly inclined 
to conservatism, called as she approached, “Have you 
had another dream?” To this she replied that she had 
dreamed of her mother. He interrupted her with the 
remark that her sister also had dreamed of her mother, 
and added that before her sister spoke of it at all he 
wished to hear her full story. It was related to him as 
above given, and then the amazed skeptic said that her 
sister had just told him of her own dream, which was 
identical in every detail. She had also dreamed that her 
dead mother came to her during the night, recounting 
the same story of the lost bonds, with the same minute 


Dreams of Discovery 


39 


instructions for recovering them. Together the three 
made their way to the place designated and there, in an 
old tin can covered with a board, were the missing bonds! 

It requires no argument to show that the explanation 
of these facts is utterly beyond the possibilities of the 
material hypothesis. But if it be true, as set forth in 
the hypothesis stated in Chapter I, that sleep and death 
differ only in that one is temporary and the other perma¬ 
nent release from the physical body, and that in each 
case the consciousness is then functioning through a ve¬ 
hicle of astral matter, then communication between the 
“dead” and the living is a perfectly natural thing during 
the hours of sleep. With some people this memory of 
the meeting may be vivid and realistic. With others it 
may be vague, unsubstantial and fleeting. With still 
others there may be no memory at all impressed upon 
the physical brain, yet the experience may have been as 
impressive to the person’s consciousness at the moment as 
in the case of the others who did remember upon awaken¬ 
ing. 

In what other possible way can the facts be explained ? 
The only person who knew where the bonds rested had 
been dead some weeks. No other person even knew that 
the bonds had been removed from their accustomed place 
of security. They were in a place where nobody would 
have thought for a moment of searching for them. They 
would have been safe from the most painstaking burglar. 
It required definite instruction to find them. How did 
that detailed information get into the consciousness of 
the two sisters, sleeping in different houses, at the same 
time? 


40 


Dreams and Premonitions 


Another dream of discovery presents precisely the 
same principles but differs most interestingly in its de¬ 
tails. The facts were given to me by Dr. L. H. Henley, 
who was at the time, and still is, chief surgeon of the 
Texas & Pacific Railway hospital at Marshall, Texas. His 
friends, a Mr. and Mrs. Moore, lived on a farm four and 
a half miles from the village of Atlanta, Texas, at the 
time of the financial panic of 1907. Mr. Moore had de¬ 
posited to his account at his bank about five thousand 
dollars. It will be remembered that during that brief 
financial stringency the banks were permitted to limit the 
amount that could be drawn out by depositors and that 
for some time only a small percentage of any balance 
could be checked out within a stated period. This ex¬ 
perience of being unable to get his money when he wanted 
it seems to have raised a question in the mind of Mr. 
Moore about the wisdom of patronizing banks at all 
and he evidently resolved that as soon as the restrictions 
had been removed he would withdraw his money and put 
it in a safe place. Just what happened between the re¬ 
sumption by the banks of the customary rules of proce¬ 
dure and the unexpected death of Mr. Moore soon after¬ 
ward, nobody knows. But when his wife went to the 
bank, in closing up the estate, expecting to find about five 
thousand dollars to the credit of her late husband, she 
was astounded when informed that he had withdrawn the 
entire sum and closed the account. That five thousand 
dollars was the total of their little fortune and she faced 
grim poverty alone. She was obliged to abandon the home 
and go to live with a married daughter at Texarkana. 
More than two years passed. She supposed that her hus- 


Dreams of Discovery 


41 


band had invested or deposited the money somewhere, and 
neglected to mention the matter to her, and she could 
only vaguely hope that it would sometime in some way 
be brought to her attention and that she would at last 
learn the truth. She finally did learn the truth,—the 
strange and improbable truth—and in a most astounding 
manner. She dreamed one night that she was with her 
husband and that he told her the secret of the missing 
money. He had said to her in the dream that he drew 
the money from the bank in gold and silver coin and that 
on a day when nobody but himself was at home he had 
buried the treasure full three feet below the surface of 
the ground, on a line running from a certain corner of 
the house to a certain corner of a shed, and exactly mid¬ 
way between the two points. 

So vivid and realistic was the dream that Mrs. Moore 
had absolute confidence that it presented the facts; but 
when she related it to her daughter’s husband and asked 
him for the money necessary to make the journey to the 
village of Atlanta he ridiculed the whole thing so merci¬ 
lessly that Mrs. Moore began to lose her confidence. But 
again she dreamed of it and again her husband showed 
her the exact spot of the buried coin, urging her to re¬ 
cover it. The repetition of the dream, however, did not 
move the skeptic. He declined to furnish money for such 
an apparently absurd investment. But again and again 
the dream recurred and Mrs. Moore could no longer en¬ 
dure the suspense. Concealing the purpose of the loan 
she casually asked her son-in-law to lend her five dollars, 
which he readily did. She hurried to the station and pur¬ 
chased a ticket for Atlanta. Alighting at the village she 


40 


Dreams and Premonitions 


Another dream of discovery presents precisely the 
same principles but differs most interestingly in its de¬ 
tails. The facts were given to me by Dr. L. H. Henley, 
who was at the time, and still is, chief surgeon of the 
Texas & Pacific Railway hospital at Marshall, Texas. His 
friends, a Mr. and Mrs. Moore, lived on a farm four and 
a half miles from the village of Atlanta, Texas, at the 
time of the financial panic of 1907. Mr. Moore had de¬ 
posited to his account at his bank about five thousand 
dollars. It will be remembered that during that brief 
financial stringency the banks were permitted to limit the 
amount that could be drawn out by depositors and that 
for some time only a small percentage of any balance 
could be checked out within a stated period. This ex¬ 
perience of being unable to get his money when he wanted 
it seems to have raised a question in the mind of Mr. 
Moore about the wisdom of patronizing banks at all 
and he evidently resolved that as soon as the restrictions 
had been removed he would withdraw his money and put 
it in a safe place. Just what happened between the re¬ 
sumption by the banks of the customary rules of proce¬ 
dure and the unexpected death of Mr. Moore soon after¬ 
ward, nobody knows. But when his wife went to the 
bank, in closing up the estate, expecting to find about five 
thousand dollars to the credit of her late husband, she 
was astounded when informed that he had withdrawn the 
entire sum and closed the account. That five thousand 
dollars was the total of their little fortune and she faced 
grim poverty alone. She was obliged to abandon the home 
and go to live with a married daughter at Texarkana. 
More than two years passed. She supposed that her hus- 


Dreams of Discovery 


41 


band had invested or deposited the money somewhere, and 
neglected to mention the matter to her, and she could 
only vaguely hope that it would sometime in some way 
be brought to her attention and that she would at last 
learn the truth. She finally did learn the truth,—the 
strange and improbable truth—and in a most astounding 
manner. She dreamed one night that she was with her 
husband and that he told her the secret of the missing 
money. He had said to her in the dream that he drew 
the money from the bank in gold and silver coin and that 
on a day when nobody but himself was at home he had 
buried the treasure full three feet below the surface of 
the ground, on a line running from a certain corner of 
the house to a certain corner of a shed, and exactly mid¬ 
way between the two points. 

So vivid and realistic was the dream that Mrs. Moore 
had absolute confidence that it presented the facts; but 
when she related it to her daughter’s husband and asked 
him for the money necessary to make the journey to the 
village of Atlanta he ridiculed the whole thing so merci¬ 
lessly that Mrs. Moore began to lose her confidence. But 
again she dreamed of it and again her husband showed 
her the exact spot of the buried coin, urging her to re¬ 
cover it. The repetition of the dream, however, did not 
move the skeptic. He declined to furnish money for such 
an apparently absurd investment. But again and again 
the dream recurred and Mrs. Moore could no longer en¬ 
dure the suspense. Concealing the purpose of the loan 
she casually asked her son-in-law to lend her five dollars, 
which he readily did. She hurried to the station and pur¬ 
chased a ticket for Atlanta. Alighting at the village she 


42 


Dreams and Premonitions 


was fortunate enough to find the old negro who had been 
employed on the country place. He obtained a spade and 
they drove out to the old home. Carefully measuring 
the distance according to the dream directions, the exact 
spot where the money was alleged to be secreted was as¬ 
certained and the negro began to dig. In due time he un¬ 
earthed the carefully protected coin, three feet below the 
surface. Mrs. Moore returned in triumph with nearly 
five thousand dollars! 

In this interesting case with its happy denouement 
the question naturally arises, “If this dream really repre¬ 
sented a meeting of the consciousness of the dead hus¬ 
band and that of the living wife, why did he delay so 
long about giving the information ?” The answer is that 
by the hypothesis the delay was not in giving the informa¬ 
tion but was probably caused by the inability of Mrs. 
Moore to impress it upon her physical brain and thereby 
bring it through into her waking consciousness. Appar¬ 
ently only after long continued effort did she finally 
triumph; but once she had succeeded in bringing the 
memory through into the waking state she was able to 
repeat it any number of times. 

Another case of treasure recovered presents quite 
different circumstances. At the time of the discovery of 
the gold the old miser who had buried it had been dead 
more than seventy years and there was nothing that we 
know of to cause the dreamer to be thinking of him, or of 
a hidden fortune. The story was printed January 21, 
1908, by the New York World, whose reporter went 
very fully into the details: 

“Miss Lucy Alvord of Taylortown, N. J., told her 


Dreams of Discovery 


43 


brother Claude on Sunday morning that her grandfather, 
who died in 1837, came to her in a dream the night 
before, appearing so natural that, although she had never 
seen a picture of him, she recognized him from her 
mother’s description. He was middle-aged and wore a 
beard. In the dream he seemed to shake Miss Alvord 
and arouse her. She stared at him and was about to 
speak, but he indicated silence and motioned her to fol¬ 
low him. She followed him into the kitchen of the house, 
a wing that was built long before the Revolution. The 
house itself has been occupied by the Alvord family for 
five generations. Stepping to the north side of the great 
room the man opened the iron door of the brick oven 
alongside the fireplace. He stepped inside the big oven 
and reappeared with a stone jar which he set on the 
table in the middle of the room. He then seemed obli¬ 
vious to the presence of Miss Alvord, and to her, in the 
dream, his conduct seemed perfectly natural. He dug 
his hands into the crock and brought them out filled with 
gold pieces. He emptied the crock on the table and be¬ 
gan to stack and count the money. He made separate 
stacks of English and American coins and of the differ¬ 
ent denominations. He made figures on a slip of paper, 
which he totalled and put in his pocket. 

“Then the visitor put the money back into the crock 
and crawled into the oven. Miss Alvord peered in and 
saw him wall up the crock with bricks and mortar. The 
oven is six feet deep and the wall was scarcely noticeable 
in the great depth. When all had been secured the man 
closed and locked the iron door. Then Miss Alvord woke 
up. When she met her brother at breakfast she told 


44 


Dreams and Premonitions 


him the story. The vividness of her dream had fright¬ 
ened her; but she insisted that her brother attack the 
wall of the oven. She was confident that he would find 
the stone crock and the treasure. He laughed at her, 
but to humor her went at the wall with a crowbar. The 
first light blow went through the wall. A few blows 
demolished it, and there lay a crock such as the woman 
had seen in her dream. The excitement of the sister and 
brother knew no bounds. They dragged out the crock 
and opened it, and before their eyes lay gold. They 
emptied it on the kitchen table—a table made generations 
ago out of a slab of pine. They counted the money. 
In the heap of gold was four thousand and some odd 
dollars. The hoard belonged to Silas Alvord, the grand¬ 
father, in all probability. He was the last of the family 
to work an iron forge on the place. He made anchors, 
anchor chains and other implements. When he died, in 
1837, it was thought he had a fortune. Apparently, how¬ 
ever, he left nothing but the farm, valuable in itself. Then 
his relatives thought he had lost his money in wildcat 
banks. Miss Alvord’s story of the strange dream of the 
finding of the hoard of gold was told about the country¬ 
side, and all day yesterday neighbors heard her repeat 
it and looked in the oven and saw where the bricks had 
been removed.” 

Still another dream of discovery, resulting in the re¬ 
covery of several thousand dollars in gold coin, is re¬ 
ported from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which indicates that 
while the physical body is asleep the consciousness es¬ 
capes its material confinement, and may bring back to 
the waking hours information which it has acquired in 


Dreams of Discovery 


45 


the ethereal regions. The following story appeared in 
the Associated Press dispatches sent out from Lancaster 
June 19, 1916 and was widely reprinted throughout the 
country : 

“When John Bellman, farmer, near Brickerville, died 
six months ago, very little money was found, though 
the widow knew he had a substantial amount. In April, 
William Heil took possession of the farm, and he, too, 
made fruitless searches for Bellman’s money. Tuesday 
night he dreamed that Bellman came to his bedside and 
told him that the money was buried in the hay-mow. 
Yesterday morning he and his wife searched in that 
place and found a box, deep hidden in the hay, and upon 
opening it, found thousands of dollars in five, ten and 
twenty dollar gold pieces. The widow of Bellman was 
notified, and took possession of the wealth. Those inter¬ 
ested will not tell the amount, but reports have it from 
$5,000 to $15,000.” 

On September 25, 1909, the New York Evening 
Journal published this: 

“More than five years ago Myra Auld, the half-grown 
daughter of S. M. Auld, living near New Wilmington, 
Pennsylvania, dreamed that on the farm next to that on 
which her father lived there had been buried a pot of 
gold. She induced her father to buy this farm when 
opportunity offered, and since that time she has been 
searching for the gold which she saw in her dreams. To¬ 
day her perseverance was rewarded when she brought up 
from the bottom of an old, abandoned well on the farm 
$8,000 in gold, which had been buried for evidently 
twenty years. The farm had been owned by James Bu- 


46 


Dreams and Premonitions 


chanan, a rather eccentric farmer, who died some years 
since. He had the reputation of being a miser and was 
always in great fear of robbers. Some years before his 
death Buchanan told some of his neighbors that he had 
buried some gold where those who did not deserve it 
would not find it. It had evidently been the intention of 
Buchanan to make some mention of this in a will which 
he intended to have written before his death, but he died 
suddenly, and the will which he had made some years 
before stood. The gold money was in an old powder 1 
can and it was filled level full with the gold, and the lid 
had been roughly soldered on and the whole affair 
wrapped in an old gunny sack. Miss Auld declares that 
she had searched every square foot of the farm at least 
twenty different times in the last five years, and that this 
was her tenth trip into the old well. Some animal had 
burrowed in the earth by the can and had exposed part 
of the old sack which enwrapped the can of gold. Wil¬ 
liam Hays, administrator of the Buchanan estate, admits 
the finding of the gold and says he will lay claim to it in 
the name of the estate.” 

This case is not so strong as the preceding ones, but 
it is worthy a place in the ever-growing catalog of 
facts which reveal the real nature of human conscious¬ 
ness. In this case the miser had told some of his neigh¬ 
bors that he had buried the gold, presumably on his 
farm, and the skeptical will argue that the girl had heard 
these stories and, believing them, had induced her father 
to purchase the farm. This is possible and it reduces the 
value of the evidence to the testimony of Miss Auld. That 
should be given the same weight that it would have in 


Dreams of Discovery 


47 


any other matter. She asserts that she saw the gold in 
her dreams but evidently could not definitely locate it, 
and says that because of her dreams she induced her 
father to secure the farm. There seems to be no possible 
motive for telling the dream story unless it is true. There 
was nothing to be gained by it. If the tales told by 
neighbors, of the miser’s hidden gold, led to the purchase 
of the farm, there appears to be no conceivable reason for 
fabricating the dream story. But the case lacks the 
strength of the preceding ones, in which the sequel fur¬ 
nishes overwhelming evidence and leaves us with no possi¬ 
ble alternative conclusion. 

A case in which a dream was the means of recovering 
the body of a lost son is given in the New York Ameri¬ 
can, of October 18th, 1915, under the title “Mother’s 
Dream Saves Son From Potter’s Field.” The story fol¬ 
lows : 

“A mother’s graphic dream in which she saw the body 
of her long missing son being lowered into a pauper’s 
grave has led to the discovery of the body. It marks one 
of the strangest incidents in local police history. Harry 
Kauffman, of No. 264 Cherry Street, disappeared June 
30. His body was found July 4 and buried the same 
day among unidentified dead. The only record aside 
from mere description was that death had been due to 
drowning. Last week Mrs. Liba Kauffman dreamed all 
the details of the recovery and burial of her son’s body. 
She informed her husband. He went to the Bureau of 
Unidentified Dead. The details as made known to his 
wife in the dream tallied in essentials with the actual 
incidents connected with the burial of Kauffman’s body. 


48 


Dreams and Premonitions 


It was soon learned that the body buried on July 4 really 
was that of the missing boy. Orders were then given to 
have it exhumed. Yesterday the funeral was held from 
the Kauffman home.” 

In this case about three months passed and the mother, 
who no doubt had been thinking daily of her son and 
mourning for him, at last brought the knowledge of 
the facts into her waking consciousness. Many another 
mother may have had a similar experience, and may 
have longed as earnestly for a clue to the mysterious dis¬ 
appearance of her boy, and yet failed to get it. One of 
the world’s greatest psychologists, who enjoys the advan¬ 
tage of highly developed clairvoyance to facilitate his 
studies, remarks that there is nothing strange about the 
fact that a very small percentage of astral experiences are 
brought through into the waking state, but that the 
greater wonder is that anything at all is brought through 
on account of the fact that in order to do so there must 
be the rare combination of astral, mental and physical 
conditions that make it possible. The factors involved 
are, naturally enough, many and varied but the degree of 
sensitiveness represented by the dreamer is certainly a 
most important one. 

Among dreams of discovery one of the most dramatic 
is that connected with the Wilkins case at Oakland, Cal., 
in 1908. 

Mr. and Mrs. Wilkins lived in a small cottage in 
Elmhurst, a suburb of Oakland. She had been absent for 
some months and he had given to neighbors contradictory 
statements about her prolonged “visit to friends in the 
eastbut there was no evidence to support the growing 


Dreams of Discovery 


49 


suspicion in the neighborhood until a Mrs. Anderson, liv¬ 
ing near, had her remarkable dream, in which she seemed 
to be in the Wilkins cottage. A quarrel arose between 
Wilkins and his wife. He insisted that she should sign 
the deed for a house which he desired to sell. She abso¬ 
lutely refused. At the height of the quarrel, he caught 
up a carving knife and stabbed her. Then, so ran the 
dream, he carried the body to the woodshed in the rear, 
tore up the floor, made a grave, buried the corpse and 
replaced the floor. At that point Mrs. Anderson awoke. 
She attributed the dream to the talk in the neighborhood, 
but on the following night the dream recurred with all 
its ghastly details. 

There seems to have been a most interesting variation 
in Mrs. Anderson's dreams. Sometimes she saw Mrs. 
Wilkins walk slowly to the woodshed and there disappear. 
Sometimes Mrs. Anderson dreamed that it was she (Mrs. 
Anderson) who quarreled with Wilkins and was killed 
and then buried by him. Something of a sensation was 
created by the dreams but the authorities naturally hesi¬ 
tated to act on a dream clue. The neighbors, however, 
were determined to investigate and the investigation 
proved the accuracy of Mrs. Anderson's dream. The 
dead body of Mrs. Wilkins was found beneath the floor 
of the shed. Wilkins was convicted and hanged in San 
Quentin prison. But for the dream there would have 
been no evidence against him. 

A more recent case in which a dream led to the dis¬ 
covery of a crime is reported by the Spokesman Review, 
Spokane, Washington, of May 23, 1916. The story fol¬ 
lows : 


50 


Dreams and Premonitions 


“After a dream in which he saw his son. Dallas 
Greene, who had been missing for nearly a month, killed 
by a man, J. W. Greene, of W. 1002 Seventh Avenue, 
visited Troy, Mont., Saturday, and after a search with 
officers found his son’s body buried in a dense thicket of 
brush on Callahan creek, about a mile from town. The 
circumstances indicated that murder had been committed, 
and Jack Miller, with whom Greene is said to have been 
camped near the spot of the supposed murder, and who 
is alleged to have sold horses which formerly belonged 
to Greene, was placed under arrest and now is in the jail 
at Libby.” 

The following sequel appeared in the Portland Jour¬ 
nal of July 23, 1916: 

“Spokane, Wash., July 22.—John Miller was today 
found guilty by a jury at Libby, Mont., of murdering 
Dallas Greene, son of J. W. Greene, Spokane and Port¬ 
land, aged 19, last March. 

“The murdered boy’s father is extensively interested 
in Oregon realty and recently acquired the Royal Palm 
hotel property at Portland, trading in a big Montana 
farm. 

“Just after this deal Mr. Greene bid his son good-bye 
at Kalispell to go to Portland. There he dreamed one night 
of seeing the boy killed by a stranger with an axe and 
the body buried in Montana timber. Returning im¬ 
mediately, he started an investigation that revealed the 
boy’s body buried near the farm with a bullet hole in 
the head.” 

Cases of the finding of the bodies of the drowned 
through the agency of dreams are very numerous. In 


Dreams of Discovery 


51 


such instances the dreamer is usually someone closely re¬ 
lated to the deceased and who is much distressed by the 
fatality. Under such circumstances the overwrought 
mind becomes more sensitive for the time being and the 
astral impressions have a much better opportunity of be¬ 
ing effective in the waking state. The following case 
is a good illustration of this class of dreams. It was 
reported in the Spokane Chronicle, Jan. 12, 1917: 

“A dream of his widow led to the finding of the body 
of Gustav Dill of Duncannon, Pa., who was drowned in 
the Susquehanna river there three weeks ago, when his 
boat overturned. 

‘‘Experienced river men had dragged the stream, mis¬ 
sing, so they believed, no current or eddy in which the 
body might have been lodged. 

“Several nights ago, in a dream, Mrs. Dill saw every 
circumstance of the finding of the body, and later the 
funeral of the drowned man. 

“She was unable at first to prevail upon any person 
to search for the body. Finally two old river men, in¬ 
credulous but full of pity, agreed to take up the search 
again. Within five minutes after the men had thrown 
in their grappling irons, the body was hooked and brought 
to the surface at the place indicated by Mrs. Dill.” 

A case in which it required repeated efforts to attain 
success is related by the Denver Post, of October 24, 
1915. This is the story: 

“A woman’s faith in a dream and her adherence to 
injunctions given there by her father may be the means 
of winning a $14,233 law suit for that father’s former 
partner and of saving the partner from a jail judgment. 


52 


Dreams and Premonitions 


On successive nights last week Mrs. Carl F. Vote, 2531 
Stout Street, dreamed that her father, Charles F. Leimer, 
came to talk to her. Mr. Leimer died a year ago. The 
first two dreams were identical. In each she told her 
father exactly how she had disposed of her property since 
he had died, and asked his advice. The father attempted 
to tell her what to do—and she woke up. The third 
night she dreamed the same, but did not wake up. Her 
father advised her as to the care of the property, and fur¬ 
ther told her to look in an old trunk in the attic for some 
papers. These he told her to take to his former partner, 
Sylvester Knuttel, a real estate man. The next morning 
she had almost decided not to heed the admonition, for 
she had gone through the trunk many times before and 
was sure that nothing worth while had been left there. 
But she was convinced from the three dreams that the 
spirit of her father was trying to communicate some¬ 
thing of importance. She looked, found the papers, but 
did not realize their significance until she took them to 
Knuttel. He was overjoyed to receive them, and told her 
they would prove conclusively his title to eight lots in 
Berkeley and some land in Jefferson county, which are 
the basis of a suit by Mrs. Eva May Strong for $14,233. 
Leimer, he said, had been taking care of the papers for 
him, and at his death they were lost. Mrs. Strong, who 
is the daughter-in-law of the late millionaire, Samuel 
Strong, is suing for title to the lots, for heavy punitive 
damages from Knuttel, also demanding that Knuttel be 
sent to jail until any judgment returned against him is 
satisfied.” 

This is a case in which there was certainly good rea- 



Dreams of Discovery 


53 


son for making strenuous and sustained effort to impress 
upon the mind of the dreamer the whereabouts of the 
missing papers. 

What can the materialistic hypothesis possibly do with 
the facts presented in these dreams of discovery? Before 
the testimony of these witnesses the adherents of that 
outgrown hypothesis stand silent. They can neither deny 
the facts nor explain them. 

A recent writer on the mystery of dreams remarks 
that “dreams locating lost articles may be but drafts on 
the marvelous storehouse of subconscious memory. ,, That 
would at least be a possible explanation where one loses a 
pocketknife or a key, searches in vain for the lost article, 
and then dreams of its exact location. But how can it 
explain the finding of things which the dreamer did not 
lose, of which there can be, neither consciously nor sub¬ 
consciously, a memory record, and of which the dreamer 
knows nothing whatever beyond what he learns from the 
dream state? In at least two of these cases (Reeves Sny¬ 
der and Moore) information unknown to any living being 
is obtained during the hours of sleep, is immediately put 
to the test, and results in the recovery of valuables. In 
these two cases alone we have evidence of the soundness 
of the hypothesis laid down in Chapter I, which is not 
merely convincing in its character but is also conclusive 
in its facts. 




































































CHAPTER IV 


VARIETIES OF DREAMS 

While many dreams may be traced to material causes 
there are many others which undoubtedly owe their ori¬ 
gin to the activities of the ethereal world where, function¬ 
ing in his astral body while the physical body sleeps, the 
dreamer is more or less awake to, and conscious of, what 
is going on about him. To people who have thought 
but little upon such subjects there will, at first, be no ap¬ 
parent difference between a dream which results from 
the automatic action of the idle physical brain and its 
etheric counterpart, and the dream which is the result of 
astral activities, recalled at the moment of awakening. 
Each is but a memory, a mental picture associated with 
various emotions. But there is nevertheless a distinction 
and although it is often slight and elusive at first it grows 
to definiteness with experience. Upon first entering a 
garden filled with a profusion of blossoms it is difficult 
to distinguish between the various delicate perfumes but 
after a little experience one is able to separate and recog¬ 
nize the different odors. And somewhat thus it is in the 
subtle regions of the dream. What is at first elusive be¬ 
comes definite and unmistakable with experience. 

Every dreamer is aware that there are, broadly speak¬ 
ing, two general classes of memories which he calls 
dreams. In one the dream is more or less chaotic, dis¬ 
jointed, illogical and fantastic. Such dreams are usu- 


56 


Dreams and, Premonitions 


ally the result of the automatic action of the brain. They 
lack coherence and logic because the thinker, the ego, is 
not there. He has withdrawn his consciousness with the 
separation of the astral body from the physical body and 
is either dreamily drifting about in his astral vehicle or 
is alert to his surroundings, according to his stage of evo¬ 
lution. The physical body has temporarily lost its tenant 
as certainly as a suit of clothes abandoned before retir¬ 
ing has lost its occupant. When the ego returns to its 
tenement of clay and the center of consciousness is trans¬ 
ferred once more to the physical brain, the fragmentary 
pictures become a part of the memory. 

These more or less fantastic thought images sometimes 
owe their origin in part to external stimuli, and the brain, 
without the directing intelligence of the ego, may magni¬ 
fy the pressure of a button into the stab of a dagger, or 
the sound of a rolling marble into the roar of artillery. 
In such dreams the most ludicrous situations cause no 
mirth and the most impossible transactions call out no 
challenge from the reason, because no intellect is pres¬ 
ent to protest against the riot of chaos. There is a total 
absence of relationship between cause and effect, while 
all laws of space and matter, have disappeared. The 
dreamer is at one moment walking through the quiet coun¬ 
try lanes near his home and the next instant may be 
seated on the throne of Siam. He changes personality 
with equal facility and may become, in a twinkling, one 
of his neighbors or his own grandfather without the 
slightest suspicion that it is a rather remarkable transfor¬ 
mation. He may pass swiftly from a pleasant chat with a 
friend to a furious quarrel in which his friend changes 


Varieties of Dreams 


57 


into a bandit and slays him; and, after calmly looking 
down on his own corpse for a moment, with no sense of 
surprise, he rises from the dead, drags his murderer into 
court and gives testimony about his own assassination 
without for a moment being aware that there is anything 
either illogical or impossible in the whole affair. 

The other class of dreams differs from all this as in¬ 
telligence differs from stupidity, or mental balance dif¬ 
fers from insanity. This class of dreams consists of 
either the experiences of the man in the astral region 
while the abandoned physical body is asleep, or else of 
some truth of nature or some premonition which the ego 
attempts, with more or less success, to impress upon the 
physical brain and which is in some degree remembered 
upon awakening. Such dreams are akin to the activities 
of the waking consciousness in that they are orderly, 
coherent and logical. Different people will recall the 
events with varying degrees of success, some being able 
to remember only a very little while others review all the 
details with as vivid recollection as the occurrences of 
yesterday’s waking hours. But, whether the memory 
grasps little or much, all that is recalled will be reasonable 
and natural. The dreamer remembers that he has been 
to some place, which may or may not be a place that he 
knows in his waking consciousness; or he may remember 
that he has visited some friend, whether dead or living 
matters not, for when his living friend is asleep he, also, 
is functioning in his astral body. The dreamer on awak¬ 
ening may sometimes have a memory of a conversation 
with somebody and, if so, it will be a sane and logical 
conversation, quite as able, or perhaps abler, than anything 


58 


Dreams and Premonitions 


he is capable of in his waking state; for in the astral 
realm the center of his consciousness is nearer the ego 
and the thought is therefore a fuller and freer expression 
of himself than it is when sent through the physical brain. 
This explains why occasionally some great poem is writ¬ 
ten, or invention is made, or problem is solved, by thought 
brought through into the waking consciousness from the 
sleeping hours. 

It not infrequently happens that one who has recently 
lost a very dear companion or friend remembers upon 
awakening to have been with him. If the memory is 
vivid and the event seems realistic there is very strong 
probability that the dream is the memory of an astral ex¬ 
perience. Quite often the dreamer will bring back a mem¬ 
ory of the emotions aroused by renewed association 
with the departed,—a lingering memory of joy and exalt¬ 
ation. Such memories from the ethereal world are, with 
some people, full and complete, while with others they 
are the merest fragments. As a rule they come at widely 
separated periods, and months may elapse between them. 
This is not in the least because the association is not re¬ 
newed night after night, for it invariably is, but wholly 
because the dreamer is unable to impress the memory of 
it upon the brain consciousness. It is possible to culti¬ 
vate the ability to do so and slowly but steadily to ex¬ 
pand the consciousness until one is enabled to bring a full 
and vivid memory of the astral activities into the daily 
life; but a full discussion of the details essential to suc¬ 
cess in the undertaking can best be left for a following 
chapter. 

The dreams that are the result of the automatic ac- 


Varieties of Dreams 


59 


tivity of the physical brain or of vagrant vibrations drift¬ 
ing through its etheric counterpart, may be dismissed as 
being of no importance whatever. It is necessary to class¬ 
ify them only to eliminate them. The dreams that are 
memories of the hours spent in the ethereal regions may 
be extremely important to one who will take the trouble 
to understand them because they are the activities of his 
consciousness working on higher levels. That higher 
state of consciousness is so radically different from its 
expression conditioned by physical matter that it is impos¬ 
sible to comprehend it fully, but the fragments of it that 
come through into the waking state at least prove its al¬ 
most omniscient character. 

Having eliminated the dreams arising from physical 
causes we may now classify the remainder. These may 
be divided into two classes and be designated as dreams 
that are the memories of astral experiences and dreams 
that are the result of the attempt of the ego to impress 
ideas or facts upon the brain consciousness. Dreams of 
the latter variety are often symbolical for, as has been 
well said, symbology is the language of the soul. 

Obviously, facts or ideas impressed on the brain con¬ 
sciousness by the ego himself are likely to be of the great¬ 
est importance. The ideas may represent profound truths 
of nature and the facts may disclose the future or contain 
a warning that it may be extremely desirable to fully 
comprehend. The success of the ego’s attempt, however, 
necessarily depends upon a number of things and a little 
thought on the subject will suffice to show why failure is 
common. C. W. Leadbeater, in his valuable little volume, 
Dreams, says: 


60 


Dreams and Premonitions 


“A result which follows from the ego’s supernormal 
method of time-measurement is that in some degree pre¬ 
vision is possible to him. The present, the past, and, to 
a certain extent, the future lie open before him if he 
knows how to read them; and he undoubtedly thus fore¬ 
sees at times events that will be of interest or importance 
to his lower personality, and makes more or less success¬ 
ful endeavors to impress them upon it. 

“When we take into account the stupendous difficulties 
in his way in the case of an ordinary person—the fact that 
he is himself probably not yet even half awake, that he 
has hardly any control over his various vehicles, and can¬ 
not, therefore, prevent his message from being distorted 
or altogether overpowered by the surgings of desire, by 
the casual thought-currents in the etheric part of his 
brain, or by some slight physical disturbance affecting his 
denser body—we shall not wonder that he so rarely fully 
succeeds in his attempt. Once, now and again, a com¬ 
plete and perfect forecast of some event is vividly brought 
back from the realms of sleep; far more often the pic¬ 
ture is distorted or unrecognizable, while sometimes all 
that comes through is a vague sense of some impending 
misfortune, and still more frequently nothing at all pene¬ 
trates the denser body. 

“It has sometimes been argued that when this pre¬ 
vision occurs it must be mere coincidence, since if events 
could really be foreseen they must be foreordained, in 
which case there can be no free-will for man. Man, how¬ 
ever, undoubtedly does possess free-will; and therefore, 
as remarked above, prevision is possible only to a certain 
extent. In the affairs of the average man it is probably 


Varieties of Dreams 


61 


possible to a very large extent, since he has developed no 
will of his own worth speaking of, and is consequently 
very largely the creature of circumstances; his karma 
places him amid certain surroundings, and their action 
upon him is so much the most important factor in his his¬ 
tory that his future course may be foreseen with almost 
mathematical certainty. 

“When we consider the vast number of events which 
can be but little affected by human action, and also the 
complex and widespreading relation of causes to their ef¬ 
fects, it will scarcely seem wonderful to us that on the 
plane where the result of all causes at present in action 
is visible, a very large portion of the future may be fore¬ 
told with considerable accuracy even as to detail. That 
this can be done has been proved again and again, not 
only by prophetic dreams, but by the second-sight of the 
Highlanders and the predictions of clairvoyants; and it 
is on this forecasting of effects from the causes already in 
existence that the whole scheme of astrology is based. 

“But when we come to deal with a developed individu¬ 
al—a man with knowledge and will—then prophecy fails 
us, for he is no longer the creature of circumstances, but 
to a great extent their master. True, the main events of 
his life are arranged beforehand by his past karma; but 
the way in which he will allow them to affect him, the 
method by which he will deal with them, and perhaps 
triumph over them—these are his own, and they cannot 
be foreseen except as probabilities. Such actions of his in 
their turn become causes, and thus chains of effects are 
produced in his life which were not provided for by the 


62 


Dreams and Premonitions 


original arrangement, and, therefore, could not have been 
foretold with an exactitude.”* 

It is not easy to comprehend in the physical brain 
consciousness how events can be known before they oc¬ 
cur. May not the explanation be that they have occurred 
so far as inner planes are concerned, but that only as they 
work outward from the realm of causation and become 
materialized in what we call an event, can the limited 
physical consciousness become aware of them? If phys¬ 
ical matter is a limitation of consciousness it must neces¬ 
sarily give rise to illusory ideas of the superphysical 
realms, where what we call past, present and future may 
represent entirely different conditions than we are now 
able to conceive. Sir Oliver Lodge says: 

“A luminous and helpful idea is that time is but a rela¬ 
tive mode of regarding things; we progress through 
phenomena at a certain definite pace, and this subjective 
advance we interpret in an objective manner, as if events 
moved necessarily in this order and at this rate. But that 
may be only one mode of regarding them. The events 
may be in some sense in existence always, both past and 
future, and it may be we who are arriving at them, not 
they which are happening.” 

Whether or not we are able to harmonize our concep¬ 
tions of the matter with the evidence of our senses, the 
evidence still remains. “However strange may be the 
phenomenon of precognition,” says Professor Charles 
Richet, “we must not let ourselves be diverted from the 
truth by the strangeness of appearances. A fact is a fact, 


* Dreams. C. W. Leadbeater. 



Varieties of Dreams 


63 


even though it may upset our conception of the universe; 
for our conception of the universe is terribly infantile.” 

It is scarcely possible to overemphasize the importance 
of the fact that people who have premonitory dreams 
represent a very wide range of mental and physical con¬ 
ditions and that in the impressions made upon the wak¬ 
ing consciousness we must naturally expect corresponding 
complexity. Some people are prone to assert that since 
they have had dreams which have accurately forecast the 
future all their succeeding dreams should prove equally 
reliable and should be regarded as infallible authority; 
but this by no means follows. Until one has reached that 
advanced point in his evolution where the ego is in control 
of his vehicles of consciousness, and the physical and 
astral bodies have become fairly obedient to the will, it 
is idle to talk of the infallibility of such psychic impres¬ 
sions. It should be remembered that with the average 
person the memories of both astral experiences and egoic 
impressions are, at best, fragmentary. They are limited 
and very partial expressions of the higher consciousness. 
Such dreams, therefore, are not something which, even 
with fuller understanding and further development, can 
be used for our guidance in the affairs of daily life. They 
are fragmentary and partial, their expression is not with¬ 
in the control of the will, and they may at any time be 
distorted by the physical brain conditions of the moment 
and thus be rendered fantastic or ambiguous. This being 
true we cannot positively know the truth or falsity of 
such premonitions until the event they refer to has oc¬ 
curred. In one instance the event transpires in perfect 
conformity to the dream while in another we find, perhaps, 


64 


Dreams and Premonitions 


that what we expected to happen to ourself really befalls 
a friend, or does not happen to anybody, so far as our 
physical plane knowledge goes. 

The reason for the failure of the premonition may 
be found in one of the foregoing explanations, or in still 
other possibilities as, for example, the fact that the wak¬ 
ing consciousness has brought through only a part of the 
entire drama, dropping out vital factors that would have 
modified or set aside that which we remember, and thus 
we have mistaken a fragment for the whole. 

But regardless of the fact that we cannot always 
use such flashes from the ego to shape a course in daily 
life, they are none the less useful and valuable in reveal¬ 
ing the true nature of our consciousness; and although 
we cannot harness them to rules and exceptions they oc¬ 
casionally play an important and beneficent part in our 
lives. Furthermore, by carefully studying them we can 
arrive finally at a point where we can more fully rely 
upon them because we shall thus have hastened the ar¬ 
rival of that period in our evolution where the waking 
and sleeping hours are united in unbroken consciousness; 
where the distorting factors in brain transmission will 
have disappeared and the unshadowed wisdom of the ego 
will come freely through into the physical life. 


CHAPTER V. 


MEMORIES OF ASTRAL EXPERIENCES 

Excluding the trivial and fantastic dreams—those 
which are automatically produced by the physical 
mechanism of consciousness—by far the larger part of 
the remainder are the memories of astral experiences. 
Premonitions and also the dream in which the lower mind 
is impressed with some truth of nature not previously 
understood, naturally constitute a very small proportion 
of dream activities. Dreams which are the memories of 
what one has seen and heard and said and done in the 
astral consciousness during the time when the physical 
body sleeps are greater in number because they represent 
the ordinary affairs of life. Such dreams may come to 
any person but it must not be forgotten that there must 
be a necessary combination of physical, astral and mental 
relationship that permits the vibrations of the astral mat¬ 
ter to register themselves in the physical brain. It there¬ 
fore commonly happens to the person who has reached 
the stage where he is conscious and active in the astral 
realm at night that he only occasionally, and more prob¬ 
ably very rarely, recalls the experiences through which he 
has passed. 

In premonitions we have a class of dreams that rep¬ 
resents the direct efforts of the ego to impress the lower 
mind, while in dreams that are the results of astral ex¬ 
periences we have the memories which float through 


66 


Dreams and Premonitions 


simply because, so to speak, all the intervening gates 
happen to be open at the same instant. 

As more and more facts about dreams are collected 
the hypothesis here invoked to explain them will grow 
stronger. Occasionally somebody has a unique dream that 
throws new light on the true nature of the dream state. 
In his lecture on Shakespeare (p. 45), Robert G. Ingersoll 
relates the following dream: 

“I once had a dream, and in this dream I was dis¬ 
cussing a subject with another man. It occurred to me 
that I was dreaming, and then I said to myself: If this 
is a dream I am doing the talking for both sides—con¬ 
sequently I ought to know in advance what the other 
man is going to say. In my dream I tried the experiment. 
I then asked the other man a question, and before he 
answered made up my mind what the answer was to be. 
To my surprise the man did not say what I expected he 
would, and so great was my astonishment that I awoke.” 

What Col. Ingersoll remembered as a dream was 
probably an actual conversation. Had he been familiar 
with the idea that while the physical body sleeps the con¬ 
sciousness functions through a subtler body, he could not 
have been surprised at the actual conversation in which 
the other man furnished his own ideas as he would do 
in the physical body. His memory of the incident on 
awakening was evidently a confused blending of the astral 
experience and his physical ideas of what dreams are. 

In Chapter I the difference between sleep and death 
was discussed, and the freedom of the soul, or conscious¬ 
ness, in ethereal realms while the physical body sleeps was 
pointed out. Since the relationship of physical and astral 


Memories of Astral Experiences 


67 


matter is that of interpenetration, as in the case of a 
sponge surrounded by water which both envelops it and 
permeates it, passing into the astral region is not neces¬ 
sarily a journey in space. But it may mean that, and may 
represent movement of the astral body that is extraordi¬ 
narily rapid as compared with anything of which we know 
in the physical world. But however far afield one may 
journey in the astral body there remains a magnetic con¬ 
nection with the physical body. Clairvoyant investigations 
reveal the fact that in the case of people of low evolu¬ 
tionary development the astral body remains during sleep ) 
in the immediate vicinity of the physical body, while with ' l 
the person of higher mental and moral development it 
moves freely through the astral regions as the vehicle of 
his consciousness. The experiences gained naturally 
present great variety. 

Attention has been called to the fact that one whose 
physical body is asleep may, in his astral body, visit places 
at a distance. If his friends are asleep at the same time 
he may be with them astrally although their sleeping phys¬ 
ical bodies may be hundreds of miles apart. If he is asleep, 
and they are awake he may visit them but could not com¬ 
municate with them unless they were clairaudient or un¬ 
less there were some other method for the interchange of 
intelligence, such as the planchette, and the waking friend 
or friends were sufficiently responsive to operate it. A 
case that illustrates the principles here involved came to 
my attention soon after its occurrence. A party of six 
persons, five of whom were my personal friends, were 
chatting together at the Ansonia Hotel, New York, one 
evening in June, 1914. The conversation turned to the 




68 


Dreams and Premonitions 


subject of getting communications from the living by auto¬ 
matic writing. One of the party had had some success 
in that line, and pencil and paper were procured. They 
sat grouped about the table. Mr. S. thought of Mrs. T., 
who had sailed for England three days previously, and 
would therefore be somewhere in mid-ocean. It was 
then about 10:30 p. m. in New York, and would be 
well into the night in Mrs. T.’s longitude, and she would 
presumably be asleep. The group of experimenters got 
a message about the voyage, and then Mrs. B. said to the 
invisible visitor: “Will you try to remember this ex¬ 
perience and put it in a letter to Mr. S. in the morning ?” 
The response, slowly spelled out, was, “I will. Sorry, I 
have to leave you.” About twelve days later Mr. S. re¬ 
ceived a letter from Mrs. T. which had been written at 
sea, and was dated on the morning following the experi¬ 
ment. Mrs. T. wrote: 

“I had a queer experience last night. I suddenly 
awoke about 2 a. m. The door of my cabin had blown 
open and was banging. I remembered distinctly of being 
with you in a circle of people.” 

Evidently Mrs. T. could not recall the details of her 
astral visit. She had no memory of her promise to write 
a letter about it, but she did remember being with Mr. S. 
in a circle of people, and this was so unexpected and per¬ 
plexing that she called it “a queer experience,” and felt 
impelled to write about it. Mr. S. adds that a careful cal¬ 
culation of the variation in time indicates that the hour 
mentioned by Mrs. T. corresponds with the hour of the 
meeting in the New York hotel. 

Mrs. Ella R. Tuttle, of Rochester, N. Y., furnishes 


Memories of Astral Experiences 


69 


two dreams in which the accuracy of the waking memory 
was promptly sustained by physical facts. In 1898 she 
dreamed that her mother, who was dead, came to her as 
a messenger asking assistance for a sick relative who 
lived about thirty miles away. She said, “Aunt Mary is 
very ill and needs you at once. Your father will send 
you a telegram tomorrow noon and you must go to her.” 

Mrs. Tuttle evidently accompanied her mother to the 
home of the sick relative. She saw her aunt lying in bed 
and observed that it was covered with a quilt having a 
certain peculiar pattern. She awoke, but had, of course, 
no means of immediately verifying the dream. About 
two o’clock on the afternoon of the following day she did 
receive a telegram from her father conveying the infor¬ 
mation that her aunt was ill, and requesting her im¬ 
mediate presence. She went, and found her aunt, Mrs. 
Mary Tinklepaugh, of Sodus, N. Y., very much in need of 
her assistance, as only a young and inexperienced girl was 
in charge. Upon entering the sickroom the visitor ob¬ 
served upon the bed a quilt with the pattern she had seen 
in her dream. 

Here we have a double verification on the physical plane. 
She saw on the bed the quilt of peculiar pattern of which 
she had dreamed and which had been purchased since her 
last visit. The telegram is the more important verifica¬ 
tion. There is the time discrepancy of two hours (almost 
never do the events exactly correspond to a dream) but 
that is of little consequence since it does not affect the 
main points involved—that she did receive a telegram 
from a certain person, and that the dream information 
was true to the facts. 


70 


Dreams and Premonitions 


At a much later date Mrs. Tuttle was interested in the 
project of beautifying the grounds of an estate belonging 
to a society of which she was a member. Reading in a 
magazine an announcement that contributions to a tree¬ 
planting fund would be received she wrote a letter, en¬ 
closed a donation and addressed it to Mrs. R., an officer 
of the society, but did not get the letter in the mail that 
evening. That night she dreamed that she visited the 
estate, over two thousand miles distant, and saw and con¬ 
versed with several people there. One of them called her 
attention to the fact that she had addressed the letter to 
the wrong person, and that if it went to Mrs. R. the 
money would go into a fund to be used for a totally dif¬ 
ferent purpose. It should, her informant said, be ad¬ 
dressed to Mr. W. But the dreamer was not convinced 
and argued the point. The conversation closed with this 
advice: “Look again in the magazine and you will see 
your mistake.” In the morning Mrs. Tuttle related her 
dream to her daughters, and the magazine was looked up. 
Examination showed that she had been in error in 
addressing the donation to Mrs. R. and that the dream in¬ 
formation was correct. The letter was rewritten and 
properly addressed. 

The dream terror of murderers is well known. If our 
hypothesis is sound the reason is simple, for sleep would 
again bring the murderer face to face with his victim for 
the time being. If the murderer be one sensitive enough 
for the impression to register in the physical brain the 
experience would be remembered on awakening. If he 
were less sensitive he might only have a vague sensation 
of terror instead of the vivid memory of details, as Mac- 


Memories of Astral Experiences 


71 


beth apparently did when he referred to “these terrible 
dreams that shake us nightly.” If the murderer were of a 
very unimpressionable type he would probably be quite 
undisturbed by anything except physical plane affairs and 
the fear of legal consequences. 

From Providence, R. I., a case is reported in which 
the dream agony of a murderer led to his arrest. Henry 
Kelly, seventy years old, was found murdered. The 
police searched systematically for the perpetrator of the 
crime, but, being unable to find a single clue to the 
mystery, the case was finally abandoned. Meantime the 
murderer’s remembered astral experiences were so com¬ 
pletely destroying his peace of mind that confession was 
inevitable. One day Frank J. Lyons, twenty-two years 
old, walked into the police headquarters and surrendered 
to the authorities. A Providence reporter quotes the 
self-accused murderer as follows: 

“I was haunted by his ghost, and I had to confess. 
I killed him, though I didn’t mean to. Then I went to 
my room, but I couldn’t sleep. I had strange dreams, and 
in them I saw the old man coming toward me. He 
seemed to be lame, and to be coming toward me all the 
time, as if he wanted to say something to me. I couldn’t 
stand it any longer. I fully understand the meaning of 
this to me. I suppose that it means I will be electrocuted 
or hanged, but I can’t help it. I simply had to tell.” 

Just how great was the horror created by the “strange 
dreams” only those who have been able to bring into 
the waking consciousness astral impressions of the unde¬ 
sirable sort will be able to comprehend. They must, 
indeed, have been terrible to lead to a confession that 


72 


Dreams and Premonitions 


might forfeit life, and the sentence “I couldn’t stand it 
any longer” indicates that the limit of human endurance 
had been reached. 

The vivid reality of an astral experience at the mo¬ 
ment it comes through into the waking consciousness is 
such that the just-awakened dreamer sometimes has dif¬ 
ficulty, for a moment, in believing that he has not seen 
the event with the physical eyes. An interesting example 
of this is reported from Stockholm. It would be well 
worth while to have the sequel to the story, but it was 
not possible to follow it up for further details. A press 
dispatch sent out from Stockholm under date of Septem¬ 
ber 29, 1915, tells the story: 

“The identification of a murderer by a man who never 
saw the prisoner, but who claims to have seen the mur¬ 
der committed in a dream, will be attempted by the local 
police department just as soon as General Bjorn, who 
is now critically ill in the west of Sweden, is strong 
enough to look at the photographs of the anarchist who 
assassinated his friend General Beckman, on the night 
of June 26. At the very hour that the crime was com¬ 
mitted, but many miles from the scene of it, General 
Bjorn, raving in delirium, saw in a fever-inspired vision 
his old friend shot down in a street in Stockholm. Sud¬ 
denly he shouted: ‘Drop that, you scoundrel/ Then: 
‘The shots are exploding/ When the nurse sought to 
calm him he became angry and tried to spring out of bed. 
‘Can’t you hear?’ he cried. ‘Can’t you see the smoke? 
They have murdered General Beckman. Don’t you see 
the blood on the street?’ He raved all night, but at day¬ 
break grew calmer and slept an hour. When he woke 


Memories of Astral Experiences 


73 


he said: ‘You will find that General Beckman has been 
murdered. I am sure of it/ He even described the crime 
in detail. At 9 o’clock the papers arrived telling of the 
assassination of General Beckman.” 

This was clearly not an ordinary dream. In illness the 
consciousness often appears to be oscillating between the 
physical and astral states and the result is a temporary 
clairvoyant condition. It was apparently so in the case 
of General Bjorn. 

Another case in which the details of what is occurring 
elsewhere are vividly remembered is reported in the 
Daily Telegram, of Portland, Oregon, of July 2, 1916: 

“As he lay dreaming that his brother was dying and 
that he was vainly trying to restore him, M. E. Lillis, 
member of the Portland Police Bureau, was awakened 
by the persistent ringing of the telephone in his home, 565 
Hoyt street, this morning. When he awoke and 
answered, the word came over the wire that his brother, 
William P. Lillis, special agent of the Portland Railway, 
Light and Power Company, had died unexpectedly at 
Seaside at an early hour. When Lillis left for his vaca¬ 
tion at Seaside about a week ago, he was in excellent 
health, although his constitution had been somewhat 
weakened by a severe attack of la grippe. It is believed 
that heart trouble due to the grippe was the cause of 
death. The body will be shipped to Portland today and 
funeral arrangements will be made this afternoon.” 

An instance in which medical aid was given on account 
of a dream was related to me by Dr. J. S. Devries, now 
residing at Fremont, Nebraska. In the year 1898 he 
was practicing his profession in Fontenelle, Nebraska, 


74 


Dreams and Premonitions 


and had among his patients the little daughter of Henry 
Hue, a farmer residing several miles from the town. The 
doctor, hard driven by a large practice, came home one 
evening, and retired much exhausted. He had seen his 
little patient at noon the previous day, and was intending 
to call again at the same hour on the following day. After 
sleeping a short time he awoke with an uncertain memory 
of imminent danger to the little girl, who was afflicted 
with scarlet fever. While the details were not clear, 
his apprehension was great, and he felt an irresistible 
impulse to go to her immediately. Notwithstanding his 
physical exhaustion, and the complete absence of any 
tangible evidence that he was needed, he nevertheless 
ordered his carriage out and drove rapidly to the farmer’s 
home. He arrived at midnight and found the household 
in commotion, the child exhibiting alarming symptoms, 
and a messenger just ready to leave to summon him. 

An interesting case bringing very clearly into the 
waking consciousness what is transpiring at a distance 
is a dream of Dr. L. H. Henley, chief surgeon of the 
Texas and Pacific Railway hospital at Marshall, Texas, 
who sends me an affidavit with the following story: 

“On the morning of January 8, 1910, I awoke about 
3 o’clock from a dream about my sister, Mrs. Henry W. 
Parker, who was living in Randolph Co., N. C. I had 
not heard from her for some time. I said to my wife, 
‘Sister Lou is dying—literally choking to death/ Mrs. 
Henley spoke lightly and reassuringly of the matter. I 
wrote at once to my sister, inquiring about her health. 
The following day I received a letter from her that had 
been written January 7, only a day before my dream oc- 


Memories of Astral Experiences 


75 


curred, saying that all were well, except for severe colds. 
I showed this letter to my wife, who warned me about 
being too hasty in telling my dreams! Again at about 3 
a. m., January 10, I awakened, and told Mrs. Henley 
that my sister was dying, sitting in a willow rocking 
chair, and that her husband, Henry W. Parker, was 
near death in the adjoining room. This announcement 
after the very recent letter asserting that the family was 
well, with the exception of bad colds, led my wife to 
make some facetious remarks about my sanity. 

“No reply ever came to my letter of inquiry, but at 
10 a. m., January 16, I received the following telegram: 
‘Asheboro, N. C., January 15. Dr. L. H. Henley, Mar¬ 
shall, Texas. Your sister Lou died Friday and was 
buried. Henry Parker, her husband, died today. Three 
children sick and cannot recover. Pneumonia. Come.— 
Levi V. Lowe.’ 

“Mr. H. E. Lewis, money order clerk in the post office, 
Mr. H. E. Behymer and Mrs. Henley were present when 
the telegram arrived. They had just been joking me about 
my alarm founded on a dream. I silently handed the 
telegram about to my friends. I felt quite as certain 
that the children would not die as I had felt the sad 
truth about their parents. Later the dream details about 
my sister’s death were verified. The children recovered, 
and are now living at Edora, Kansas, the two elder ones 
being Mr. Lindley Parker and Miss Mary Parker.” 

These dreams have the element of prevision. One of 
the dreams occurred five days and the other three days 
before the death of Mrs. Parker, and each of them gave 


76 


Dreams and Premonitions 


some of the details of her death, as well as the fact 
that Mr. Parker was near death. 

The Messina earthquake, like all great disasters, fur¬ 
nished a number of interesting cases, and one of the 
best attested was that of the young sailor whose dream 
revealed to him the spot where his fiancee was im¬ 
prisoned in the ruins, although the most diligent search 
in his waking consciousness had been unavailing. A 
press dispatch told the story thus: 

“A curious case of rescue was that in which a sailor on 
board the Italian battleship Regina Elana found his 
sweetheart. He was granted leave to search for the 
girl in Messina, with whom he was engaged to be mar¬ 
ried. After having sought for her in vain for four days 
in the ruins he returned to the ship exhausted and fell 
asleep. He dreamed that his fiancee said to him, T am 
alive. Come, save me.’ On awakening he obtained fresh 
leave from the commander of the ship, gathered together 
several friends, and went to the spot of which he had 
dreamed. The party pried apart the ruins of a house and 
found the girl uninjured.” 

If he searched four days in vain he could not have had 
any particular place in mind where he expected to find 
her. Yet when he succeeded in bringing the memory of 
the sleeping hours through into waking consciousness 
he went immediately to the place where she was im¬ 
prisoned by the ruins. He not only remembered con¬ 
versing with the girl, but he evidently had a clear memory 
of the locality, which enabled him to go to it. 

Mrs. Margaret E. Pomerene, of Lincoln, Nebr., fur- 


Memories of Astral Experiences 


77 


nished the following interesting details of a dream that 
was swiftly verified by events: 

“It was Oct. 8, 1916, very early in the morning when 
I was awakened from a dream that had the appearance 
of a vision. In it I found myself standing in Wyuka 
Cemetery. I was looking to the east and slightly towards 
the north, and my eyes turned upon the ground that I 
was standing on; I recognized it as kindred ground. As 
my eyes followed the outline of the ground I was asso¬ 
ciated with, I saw in the northwest corner, a little grave 
and a headstone with the words: ‘Little Theodore/ I was 
suddenly awakened from this dream with the knowledge 
that something had happened or was happening. Within 
a few minutes I heard a heavy rap at the door, and 
thought, ‘It’s a message!’ On opening the door, I 
was handed a telegram— a ‘night letter"—dated Oct. 7. 
It was as follows: 

Salt Lake City, Utah, Oct. 7, 1916, L. W. Pomerene, 
Lindell Hotel, Lincoln, Nebr. Teddy has been 
poisoned from can of milk; has been dreadfully sick 
for three days; we doubt very much his recovery. 
Have had doctor three times. Can Mother come? 
(Signed) H. W. Pomerene. 

This message was from my son concerning informa¬ 
tion of my infant grandson, Theodore. 

In little more than an hour another telegram was re¬ 
ceived as follows: 

Salt Lake City, Utah, Oct. 8, 1916. L. W. Pomerene, 
Lindell Hotel, Lincoln, Nebr. Teddy died at 4 o’clock 
this morning. What shall we do? (Signed) Henry. 

That you may better understand, allow me to say my 

son, 23 years of age, with his wife and two children, the 


78 


Dreams and Premonitions 


older less than three years, and infant Theodore, less than 
three months, had left their home in Idaho to make a home 
in Salt Lake City. Owing to the youth and inexperience of 
the parents, this change of residence was the occasion 
of considerable anxiety on my part, although I did not 
know anything of little Theodore’s illness, until informed 
by the message. 

“We decided to bring the body to Lincoln, and tele¬ 
graphed arrangements for so doing. I had related to Mr. 
Pomerene my dream as soon as he came in, describing 
to him the ground as I had seen it in my dream, repeat¬ 
ing over and over to him the dream in detail, asking 
him to take notice of the ground that we should look at 
in selecting the burial place. On entering the cemetery, 
and talking to the Sexton, a man whom we had known 
for many years, I asked him if there was any ground left 
in what was known as “the Circle,” remarking at the 
time, T suppose not,’ for it was opened so many years 
ago, and being desirable, the lots had probably all been 
sold. To my surprise he said, ‘No, there are still a num¬ 
ber of lots left at the south end. We’ll go there first 
and look at those lots.’ 

“It was there I recognized the identical ground, the 
very lot that I had seen in my dream. It was the newly 
developed ground, yet the old ground in the cemetery 
that I had looked upon in my dream. We looked at other 
lots but were unable to secure anything between this and 
the lots that were outside of our consideration. Mr. 
Pomerene made the final choice of selection, and directed 
where the grave should be placed upon it. When speak¬ 
ing to me about it later, I asked him if he had been 


Memories of Astral Experiences 


79 


influenced in locating the little grave by my dream, in 
which I saw it in the northeast corner. He said ‘No, 
while I remember it very well as you told it to me, I 
did not think of it at all at the time.’ 

“The dream has worked out in reality, exactly in every 
detail as I saw it, except the small grave stone, with the 
words ‘Little Theodore’ upon it, which will in time be 
fulfilled. When I visit the cemetery lot where Little 
Theodore’s body lies, I am able to place my feet on the 
exact spot where I stood in my dream.” 




















































































































































CHAPTER VI 


HELP FROM THE INVISIBLES 

Some of the memories that are called dreams arise 
from a wholly different source than the dreamer’s astral 
experiences. They are occasionally the result of thoughts 
and plans suggested to the dreamer by some so-called 
“dead” person—that is, someone who has passed out 
of the physical body and is living in the astral body.* 
Among such dreams are some which lead to life-saving 
activities. Occasionally they are not dreams at all but 
thoughts forced so firmly and persistently upon one’s 
mind that the reason is over-ruled and the man acts in 
spite of himself. A good example of this is to be found 
in the following case related to me by Mr. H. G. Pickett, 
President of the Helena Commercial Club, Helena, Mon¬ 
tana. His friend, Mr. J. T. Brintnell, a retired railway 
conductor, told the story to Mr. Pickett in 1884. Brint¬ 
nell was running a passenger train between Chicago and 
St. Louis. One night things had been going wrong and 
the belated crew was weary and impatient to get over 
the road. As the train was approaching a certain siding, 
Brintnell felt a strong impulse to pull the bell rope and 
stop there. He had no such orders and was greatly sur¬ 
prised that he should have thought of such a thing. 
Reasoning a moment about it, he decided that it was 
some groundless impulse but, as the train approached 


♦See Invisible Helpers, by C. W. Leadbeater. 



82 


Dreams and Premonitions 


the side-track, the feeling grew too strong for reason. 
The siding was now opposite the train. Almost mechan¬ 
ically, he pulled the bell rope and then gave the signal 
to back onto the siding. When the train came to a stop 
on the side-track, the crew gathered about to learn the 
cause of delay and asked Brintnell why he had stopped 
the train. The conductor could give no reason except his 
“feeling.” That naturally seemed to the crew to be al¬ 
most idiotic. The engineer swore roundly. Many re¬ 
marks of a very uncomplimentary nature were hurled at 
the conductor who could only stammer a feeble defense. 
But, even as they berated him, a north-bound train shot 
around the curve and dashed past. The engineer was 
completely unnerved and of course the entire crew real¬ 
ized that they had very narrowly escaped death. The 
train dispatcher had blundered and only the “irresistible 
impulse” of the conductor had prevented a terrible wreck. 

One of the most remarkable cases encountered in the 
search for unusual dreams and visions is that of Mr. C. 
W. Shaw, of 3108 College Ave., Berkeley, California. It 
is a case in which a man who was sufficiently sensitive 
to receive and retain psychic impressions, was apparently 
used by a so-called “dead” man to convey a message to 
his relatives who were unknown to Mr. Shaw and who 
lived two thousand miles away. A particularly inter¬ 
esting point is developed in a letter from Mr. Shaw- 
explaining how he obtained the address of the dead sol¬ 
dier’s father. The letter from Mr. Shaw to Mr. Hay, 
follows. 

“On the night of December 3, 1917, (last Monday) I 
returned to my home after attending a meeting of the 


Help from the Invisibles 


83 


Berkeley Defense Corps, of which I am a member, and 
retired about 11 P. M. A few moments after retiring 
and saying my prayers, (I always do that) I saw a large 
opaque light over my bed, and watching it closely, I saw 
come from it a perfect American flag, perfect in stripes 
but not in color. This shortly disappeared and I heard 
a voice say, “My name is Hay; I must speak to you/’ 
And then I saw a young man in uniform (hard to give 
detail of height and weight) but a clean looking and 
talking man whom I should say anyone would be glad 
to meet and know. I am sure I was, and shall be glad 
for him to come again. He asked me to write his folks 
and tell them he was not dead and was not unhappy. 

“I find it impossible to give you in his own words what 
he told me, but this is the substance of it: That he knew 
you missed him and were sad over his death. He smiled 
and said, ‘Tell them I am not dead but alive in another 
life, where I can still not only help and cheer you at 
home but more than all else help the boys carry on this 
great struggle for justice and right, and with them win 
the victory that shall make our homes sacred, the world 
better to live in. Tell the boys at home what a glorious 
feeling it is when you know the truth, to give one’s life 
for others. The full horror of this war has not yet 
been told and you at home cannot even comprehend what 
defeat would mean, but that will never be, for justice and 
right will conquer and the stars and stripes will always 
wave over the homes and in the hearts of the free and 
brave.’ 

“The only expression of regret he gave was that he 


84 


Dreams and Premonitions 


might have been spared a little longer to help the boys 
at the front. ,, 

Very sincerely yours, 

C. W. SHAW. 

This letter was published in a local Glidden newspaper 
and was widely copied. Mr. Shaw was asked how he 
had secured the correct address of the soldier’s family. 
His reply follows: 

“Mr. L. W. Rogers, Dear Sir:- Your first question 
relating to the parent’s address is, to me, very important. 
He did not give me their address and I did not realize 
that fact until the following morning and of course felt 
very badly over the omission. About 10:00 a. m., I re¬ 
ceived this message when in my office. ‘Go to the Oak¬ 
land Tribune office and look through the files where you 
will find what you want.’ 

“I went from Berkeley to Oakland and, after going 
back through the files for about twenty minutes, I found 
Mr. Hay’s name as the first man killed in the trenches 
and also the address of his father in Glidden, Iowa, and 
wrote to him the same night. This, to me, was the most 
impressive part of all. Sincerely yours, 

C. W. SHAW. 

A written statement of a somewhat familiar case was 
handed to me by the lady who had the experience: 

“I was about eighteen years old and living in Chicago. 
I had an Aunt Kate of whom I was very fond. She was a 
woman of about fifty, with three devoted daughters, two 
of whom lived with her and the other some little distance 
away. She died one Saturday very suddenly and her fam- 


Help from the Invisibles 


85 


ily were utterly prostrated by the blow, not only pros- 
strated, but rebellious, and plunged in the deepest grief. 
I had been at the house the Thursday following her death 
and had left the two daughters talking about the possible 
arrival of the third in a day or two. I went to my own 
house which was some distance away, and about five that 
afternoon laid down upon my bed to take a nap. I had 
a dream, if one can call it that. I say a dream though 
when I woke from it it left me with a stronger impres¬ 
sion than any dream I ever had before. Briefly it was 
this: 

“I thought I was standing in my Aunt’s own room, 
combing my hair before her mirror. I seemed to have 
forgotten the fact that she had gone. I was aware of 
someone coming in the room and turning saw my Aunt 
coming in the door. She was dressed in white and seemed 
to be wearing a little white shawl over her head. I 
thought she came straight to me and I received the im¬ 
pression from her that she had something very import¬ 
ant to say and very little time in which to say it. She 
came to me and grasped me so firmly and with such in¬ 
tensity on both arms that I could feel my arms ache, and 
she said in a voice of such deep intensity that it thrilled 
me: ‘Tell them they must not grieve so; tell them they 
must not!’ Then I saw what I had not grasped before, 
that she was not dressed in white as I had imagined, but 
clad rather in some strange luminous sort of light. Di¬ 
rectly she spoke she seemed to simply vanish from my 
sight, exactly as if she had gone through the floor. I 
thought that I went immediately from the room down¬ 
stairs and went into the living room where I expected to 


86 


Dreams and Premonitions 


find my two cousins. To my surprise the third daughter 
—the one who lived at a distance—was sitting in a circle 
before the fire with the two others. They were all weep¬ 
ing bitterly, and on a table beside my cousins was the bird 
cage with a little bird in it. I wondered at the time why 
the bird cage was not hanging in the usual place and I no¬ 
ticed particularly the clothes my cousins were all wearing. 
There the dream broke. I looked at my watch and found 
it was just five o’clock. Remember that I did not know 
that the third daughter was at the house or expected to be 
there that day. The next morning I went to my cousins. 
I said to them: ‘When did Kate get here?’ They said: 
‘She came about half past three yesterday. How did you 
know?’ I said: ‘Yesterday afternoon you three were sitting 
about the fire place.’ I told them how they were dressed. 
I said, ‘What was that bird doing in its cage on the table ?’ 
My cousin said: ‘I had just taken it down when Kate 
arrived, and I didn’t wait to hang it up again before I 
talked to her.’ 

“I sent the story of this to the Society for Psychical 
Research and they were much interested in it. They told 
me that the vision I had had of the three girls about the 
fire had probably been seen by the spirit of the mother 
and she had impressed the picture upon my brain; also 
because I was a ‘sensitive’ I was the only one who could 
hear the message that she was longing to give.” 

Mrs. M. J. Reynolds, of Victoria, contributes a re¬ 
markably interesting statement which runs as follows: 

“For several years I had spent the winters with my 
friend in her home in California. She was a widow, and 
a very delicate woman, no longer young—she was quite 


Help from the Invisibles 


87 


seventy years old. We had been very close friends for 
over twenty years and there existed a sympathetic tie be¬ 
tween us that was rare. We had practiced telepathy for 
years when apart. She had been ill most all of the winter 
of 1913, and when the spring opened, she felt much bet¬ 
ter, so I decided to come North to Victoria, to attend to 
some business, but I felt afraid if I left her alone, she 
might dwell too much on herself, and fall ill again. I 
worried considerably, and one night I dreamed that out 
of one of the rooms that was unoccupied, I saw a large 
white pillow, with a child on it, being carried by unseen 
forces through the hall, and into my room. Immediately 
I exclaimed, ‘Oh, is my friend going to die?’ A voice 
replied, ‘No—not yet. You can go north to Victoria.’ I 
then said, ‘How long will it be before she must go,’ and 
the voice replied, ‘March 25th, 1915, you should not have 
asked, you will suffer for having done so.’ I was so agi¬ 
tated that I awoke, and it all was so very clear. The tears 
were streaming down my face. I was so afraid that if I 
went to sleep again, I would forget it all, that I got up 
and wrote the date and a few lines, to recall it to my mem¬ 
ory. A/fter a time I slept again. The next morning I 
knew something unusual had happened, but just what, I 
could not recollect, until I saw the paper. Then it all came 
back to me. I did not mention it to anyone, but wrote 
the date in pencil behind the clothes closet door. This was 
in May 1913. I came north to Victoria in May, and she 
was very well all that summer. In the autumn, about the 
time I should return to my friend, my sister became very 
ill, and was obliged to go to Southern California, and 
there was no one to take her but me. I wrote my friend 


88 


Dreams and Premonitions 


and she replied, for me to go with my sister, and she 
would come to San Francisco for the winter. We met 
in San Francisco, and she was remarkably well (for her). 
I came north again with my sister, and spent the summer. 
In the autumn, when I was preparing to go to California, 
my mother was taken very ill, and I could not leave her. 
It was a great disappointment to my friend, but again she 
came to San Francisco for the winter, and was very well 
until the latter part of January, when she contracted a 
bad cold, which grew worse. She wrote me weekly, never 
telling me how bad she really was. Her last letter came 
early in March, and in it she admitted she was very ill. 
I wired asking if she needed me, to which I received re¬ 
ply, that she had trained nurses, and not to come yet. 
Then that awful date came to me, and it would force it¬ 
self on me. I could not leave my mother, and what to do 
was a puzzle. I held the thought firmly in my mind that 
she would not die—that there was nothing in my dream, 
and on the 25th of March, I used every bit of force I had 
that she should not leave me—and on the 26th, when no 
telegram came to say that she was gone, I relaxed and 
laughed at my fears. She passed away on the 27th of 
March, 1915.” 

Was the will-power of Mrs. Reynolds a factor in this 
case ? The dream seems to have been very clear and vivid 
and the asserted date of her friend’s passing was immedi¬ 
ately recorded. There may have been some inaccuracy in 
remembering the date with the physical brain but that her 
will-power and intense desire retarded the passing of her 
friend is not a far-fetched premise. 

Three dreams by three people on the same night and 


Help from the Invisibles 


89 


presenting the same details in practically the same lan¬ 
guage, led to the famous Sutton investigation case at An¬ 
napolis. The first chapter of the story is told in a press 
dispatch from Portland, Oregon, the home of the ill-fated 
lieutenant’s parents under date of August 11, 1909. It 
reads: 

“Two nights after the tragic death at Annapolis of 
Lieutenant James M. Sutton, of the United States Marine 
Corps, each of three women had a dream in which the 
young man appeared before them and informed them that 
he had been murdered. ‘The son of a gun sneaked up 
behind me and struck me on the back of the head. The 
first I knew that I had been shot was when I woke up in 
eternity/ That is the exact language used by the boy in 
the dream as he stood before each woman. The persons 
to whom the young man appeared in dream form are 
Mrs. J. N. Sutton, his mother, at the family residence in 
Portland; Mrs. Margaret S. Ainsworth, his aunt, on her 
farm in Wasco Co., Oregon, and Miss Rose Sutton, his 
sister, who was then on an Oregon Short Line train speed¬ 
ing to Annapolis. Each woman had the dream Tuesday 
night, October 15, 1907. Young Sutton died about one 
o’clock Sunday morning, October 13, 1907.” 

With this triple corroboration the mother of the dead 
lieutenant determined to clear her son’s name of the sui¬ 
cide charge. Nearly two years passed before she finally 
had the satisfaction of appearing before the court of in¬ 
quiry and hearing Dr. Edward M. Shaffer, formerly cor¬ 
oner in the city of Washington, testify that in his opinion 
as an expert it was quite impossible that Lieutenant Sut¬ 
ton could have fired into his own head the bullet that killed 


90 


Dreams and Premonitions 


him. After the first dream, and before the official in¬ 
quiry was held, the mother had other dreams. To a re¬ 
porter for the San Francisco Examiner, on the eve of the 
opening of the inquiry August 9, 1909, she said that her 
dead son had said to her: 

“ ‘Mother, dear, don’t you believe it. I never killed 
myself. They beat me to death and then shot me to hide 
the crime.’ He told me how they laid the trap for him, 
how he walked into it, how one of them grabbed him to 
pull him out of the automobile, how they held him and 
beat him; about his forehead being broken; his teeth 
knocked out, and the lump under his jaw, and how when 
he was lying on the ground someone kicked him in the 
side and smashed his watch. He begged me to live to 
clear his name. Well, after three weeks I proved some 
things he told me were true, and after repeatedly demand¬ 
ing the evidence, I got it and within the last month I have 
proved everything he told me.” 

A case which was widely published and which tells 
the story of a life-saving mission occurred in April, 1912, 
and is given as follows in the press dispatches from At¬ 
lanta, Georgia: 

“Awakened from a sleep in which he had dreamed that 
a nearby railway trestle on the Southern Railroad had 
been washed away, O. T. Kitchens, a section foreman, al¬ 
though suffering from illness, arose from his bed and 
went to South River, six miles from here, before dawn 
yesterday, and found that his dream was a reality. The 
stream, swollen by heavy rains, had carried away a trestle 
spanning a sixty-five foot chasm. He knew that a passen¬ 
ger train was soon due to arrive at the opposite side of the 


Help from the Invisibles 


91 


river, but had no means of reaching that point to warn 
the engine driver of the danger, and the river is three- 
quarters of a mile wide. Standing on the bank Kitchens 
put his hands to his lips and repeatedly shouted for half 
an hour. Finally he heard an answering shout, and he 
called out a warning to J. E. Daniel. Daniel flagged the 
train as it neared the brink of the stream.” 

How can the advocates of the materialistic hypoth¬ 
esis possibly explain this? In the Messina cases there 
was the possibility of explaining a part of what occurred 
by telepathic communication, but in the Kitchens’ dream 
there is no chance whatever of lugging in telepathy. In 
the other case somebody knew of at least a part of the 
facts necessary for the rescue. But here we have a case of 
a trainload of people who knew nothing of the danger 
that confronted them. Not a human being knew of the 
collapse of the bridge, not even Daniels, who lived nearby. 
It was late in the night, towards dawn, and the inhabi¬ 
tants of the countryside were sleeping. Telepathy is ab¬ 
solutely out of the case. There was nobody whose mind 
contained the information. Kitchens’ dream must have 
been an impelling one. He was ill, and the night was 
stormy, but in spite of the difficulties in the way his dream 
resulted in stopping the train, and very probably in saving 
many lives. 





















































































CHAPTER VII 


PREMONITORY DREAMS 

The ego is the source of premonitions. The dream 
may be a warning to one’s self or may be intended for an¬ 
other; or it may convey some information of the future. 
It may be vivid in detail or it may merely leave a very 
vague impression of impending events, but whatever its 
character and degree of efficiency it is usually the result 
of the effort of the ego to convey important information 
to the waking consciousness. 

Premonitory dreams are comparatively rare. They 
usually relate to some very important matter that is not 
far ahead in the physical life of the dreamer, or some one 
closely associated with him; and as such events are not 
numerous the premonitions are correspondingly few. Nat¬ 
urally enough, accidents and death are the subjects with 
which premonitions frequently deal. 

There’ have been many notable examples and one 
which will come instantly to mind is Abraham Lincoln’s 
premonition of approaching death. We have very defi¬ 
nite information on the subject and know that he spoke 
to his bodyguard of the matter the evening before the as¬ 
sassination, and made some philosophical remarks about 
death. It is said that he interrupted the last cabinet meet¬ 
ing he ever held to speak of a dream and Gideon Welles, 
Lincoln’s secretary of the navy, wrote down the details in 
his diary. 


94 


Dreams and Premonitions 


Lincoln was a great dreamer and appears to have at¬ 
tached much importance to what he dreamed. In a series 
of articles entitled Lincoln and Booth, by Winfield M. 
Thompson, which were widely published by a newspaper 
syndicate in 1915, Mr. Thompson writes as follows of 
Lincoln’s last dreams: 

“A few days before his death Lincoln related to his 
wife and a few friends the story of a strange dream that 
had disturbed him the night before. In his dream, he 
said, he went from room to room in the White House, 
and everywhere heard sounds of pitiful sobbing though 
no living being was in sight, ‘until I arrived at the east 
room. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a 
corpse. Around it were stationed soldiers. There was a 
throng of people, some gazing sorrowfully upon the corpse 
whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. Who 
is dead in the White House? I demanded of one of the 
soldiers.’ 

“ ‘The President,’ was his answer. ‘He was killed by 
an assassin.’ Then came a loud burst of grief from the 
crowd, which woke me from my dream.’ ” 

“On the afternoon of Friday, April 14, a few hours 
before he fell under the assassin’s bullet, Lincoln held 
his last cabinet meeting. It was remarkable for two things 
—the depth of charity and love displayed by Lincoln in 
a discussion on the return to the Union of the seceded 
states and a curious vein of mysticism the President dis¬ 
played in describing a premonitory dream he had had the 
night before. General Grant, who had just arrived from 
Appomattox, was invited to attend the meeting and did 
so. Grant was anxious about Sherman, who was con- 


Premonitory Dreams 


95 


fronted by the army of General Joseph E. Johnston in 
the vicinity of Goldsboro, N. C., and expressed a desire 
for news from him. The President responded by saying 
that he thought that all was well with Sherman—a dream 
had caused him to feel so. He then described the dream. 
His manner while doing so made a deep impression on 
most of the men about him.” 

Gideon Welles’ diary gave in extended detail what was 
said about the dream which had reference to the approach 
of important events and which, Lincoln declared, did not 
herald success but merely indicated that something very 
important was approaching. The record by Secretary 
Welles runs thus: 

“The President remarked that news would come soon 
and come favorably, he had no doubt, for he had last 
night his usual dream, which had preceded nearly every 
great event of the war. We inquired the particulars of 
this remarkable dream. He said it was in my element—it 
related to the water; that he seemed to be in a singular 
and indescribable vessel, but always the same, and that 
he was moving with great rapidity toward a dark and in¬ 
definite shore; that he had had this same singular dream 
preceding the firing on Sumter and battles of Bull Run, 
Antietam, Gettysburg, Stone River, Vicksburg, Wilming¬ 
ton, etc. General Grant remarked with some emphasis 
and asperity that Stone River was no victory—that a few 
such victories would have ruined the country and that he 
knew of no important results from it. The President 
said that perhaps he should not altogether agree with him 
but whatever might be the facts, his singular dream pre¬ 
ceded that fight. Victory did not always follow his dream 


96 


Dreams and Premonitions 


but the event and results were important. He had no 
doubt that a battle had taken place or was about to be 
fought ‘and Johnston will be beaten; for I had this strange 
dream again last night. It must relate to Sherman; my 
thoughts are in that direction and I know of no other very 
important event which is likely just now to occur.* ” 

On March 13, 1915, Col. W. H. Crook, disbursing 
officer of the White House, died at an advanced age, af¬ 
ter fifty years of continuous government service. It was 
early in 1865 that he became Lincoln’s bodyguard. His 
passing revived the stories he used to tell of his association 
with the great statesman and among those that appeared 
with the announcement of his death was this testimony 
about the dream that foretold the President’s death: 

“Col. Crook told often of how, on the afternoon be¬ 
fore Lincoln’s assassination, the President had come to 
him in confidence and said that on successive nights he 
had dreams which foretold his murder. Crook thereupon 
begged the President not to go to the theatre that evening 
as planned. Lincoln insisted, and furthermore would not 
hear of Crook accompanying him. He ordered Crook to 
go home and rest.” 

An interesting case of premonition of approaching 
death is that of Dr. J. F. Bacon, of San Francisco, who 
was killed in the earthquake of 1906. He was not able 
to bring into his waking consciousness any of the details 
but he had been sufficiently impressed with the truth of 
the approaching calamity to have an unchangeable con¬ 
viction that death was just ahead. The following account 
appeared in the San Francisco Examiner, May 3, 1906: 

“For two days before the earthquake Dr. J. F. Bacon 


Premonitory Dreams 


97 


was haunted by a premonition of sudden death. He was 
killed by the collapse of the house in which he lived. Dr. 
Bacon was well known in San Francisco. He was a prom¬ 
inent practitioner, and also the proprietor of a drug 
store at 303 Folsom street. Several times during the day 
immediately preceding the disaster he mentioned his fears 
to his friends. Instinctively he felt that a terrible fate 
was impending for him, and while he had no idea what 
was the nature of the threatened accident, he declared 
that it would kill him. To A. W. Vance, a real estate 
dealer, who was graduated from College in Dr. Bacon’s 
class, he spoke of the morbid idea which possessed him. 
T can’t tell what it is,’ he said, ‘but I know that I will 
meet a sudden death within a day or two. It is impossi¬ 
ble to explain.’ When the temblor struck San Francisco 
the house in which Dr. Bacon was sleeping at Sixth and 
Folsom, fell to the ground, burying him in the debris. 
Deceased was a graduate of the class of 1876 of the Medi¬ 
cal College of the Pacific.” 

Premonitions are not necessarily always transmitted to 
the physical life as dreams. Occasionally, in full waking 
consciousness, a premonition flashes into the mind. The 
Berkeley Gazette of August 25, 1908 prints the following: 

“When Eugene Grace, once a leader in the Southern 
colony and prominent in San Francisco business circles, 
dropped dead while running to catch a train in Berkeley 
Monday evening, it was but the working out of a premo¬ 
nition of death he had received twenty-four hours before. 
So strongly was he influenced by this innate knowledge 
of his approaching end that he had made a final dispo¬ 
sition of his effects and requested that his body be shipped 



98 


Dreams and Premonitions 


to his sister in Atlanta, Georgia. It was in the Regent 
Hotel, 562 Sutter Street, San Francisco, where he lived, 
that he received the inkling of death in the near future. 
He disposed of his property and asked John F. Shea to 
ship his body south. He spoke of his affairs, saying that 
what remained of a life insurance policy of a thousand 
dollars, after the funeral expenses had been deducted, 
should be given to his nephew and namesake in Atlanta. 
Then, having done all that was necessary on this earth, he 
bravely thrust away the subject of death. At one time 
Grace was a leading figure in San Francisco. Courtly, 
chivalrous, kind-hearted, a typical southern gentleman, he 
was immensely popular everywhere.” 

On further investigation of this case, it was found that 
it was while Mr. Grace was quietly playing a game of 
cards with some friends at his hotel that the premonition 
was received. He finished the game, and then calmly 
told his friends that he had become aware that he had but 
a short time to live. 

Another premonition that seems not to have been the 
result of a dream but rather a settled conviction that death 
was near and was inevitable is presented by a veteran of 
the civil war, Mr. J. C. Palmer of 387 The Arcade, Cleve¬ 
land, Ohio. 

“My Regiment, the 13th N. H. Volunteer Infantry, 
was in camp near Suffolk, Va., during the spring of 1863. 
The Union forces in that vicinity numbered about 16,000 
men. On or near the 10th of April the enemy numbering 
about 40,000 men, made his appearance in our front, and 
the siege of Suffolk began. As we were almost sur¬ 
rounded, and outnumbered nearly three to one, it meant 


Premonitory Dreams 


99 


retreat, surrender, or hold out if possible until reinforce¬ 
ments should come to our aid. The latter course was de¬ 
cided upon. For three weeks my regiment was on duty 
almost continuously, skirmishing, doing picket duty, and 
rushing work on the fortifications. Finally reinforce¬ 
ments came, and on May 3, 1863, a reconnaissance in 
force was made for the purpose of ascertaining the ene¬ 
mies’ strength and position. 

“In my company was a man by the name of Justin S. 
Batchelder, whose home was in Loudon, N. H. He was 
a large man, with a loud voice, was very lively, and talked 
most of the time when he had any one to talk to. On this 
morning, however, he had nothing to say, and seemed 
very much depressed. This was something so unusual, 
that his comrades asked him what the trouble was; he re¬ 
plied, “I am going to be killed todaybut, he was told, we 
are going out to reconnoiter, and do not expect that there 
will be any fighting to speak of; but he insisted that he 
would be killed that day. The matter was reported to 
our captain, and he sent for Mr. Batchelder, and told him 
if he felt that way he would detail him for some duty in 
camp, and he need not go with the regiment. 'No,’ he 
replied, T will go with the boys, but I shall be killed today. 

“We marched down to Suffolk, crossed the Nanse- 
mond River on an improvised bridge, and found that the 
regiments who had preceded ours were already engaged 
with the enemy. My regiment was ordered to form a 
line of battle across an open field to our left, while our 
skirmishers engaged the enemies’ skirmishers. Finally 
the order was given to charge. The bullets flew as we 



100 


Dreams and Premonitions 


crossed that field, and Batchelder was shot, and instantly 
killed, almost as soon as we started on the charge.” 

In studying the phenomena of premonitions the ques¬ 
tion naturally arises, “Why does the ego impress, or try 
to impress, a warning upon the waking consciousness?” 
The reason appears to be plain enough. When a physi¬ 
cian knows that death must soon come to his patient he 
discloses the truth to him. He never permits death to 
come suddenly and unexpectedly upon him if he can pre¬ 
vent it, but gives him time to arrange his affairs and “put 
his house in order.” From the purely physical viewpoint 
there is excellent reason for this course. 

If death is inevitable it is clearly much better to know 
it a short time in advance. (To be advised of the fact 
too far in advance of the event would obviously not be an 
advantage.) So even if death is unavoidable the premo¬ 
nition is of great value. But deaths or accidents which 
are the subjects of premonitions sometimes are avoid¬ 
able and have been thus escaped. When we remember the 
difficulties with which the ego must deal in impressing 
the lower mind with such warnings it is easy to under¬ 
stand how very partial and insufficient most of them must 
be to the brain consciousness. A premonition that is in¬ 
tended to be full and vivid in detail may register in the 
brain merely as a vague impression of impending danger, 
or perhaps as an unshakable conviction of approaching 
death, as in the case of Dr. Bacon, but be utterly lacking in 
details that can lead to a course of action. Had Dr. Ba¬ 
con known that an earthquake would raze the building in 
which he was accustomed to sleep, would he have left the 
city the day before it occurred ? To what extent accident 


Premonitory Dreams 


101 


and death might be avoided if the people who have pre¬ 
monitions were more sensitive, it would be difficult to 
guess. 

Cases are not wanting in which the ego appears, by- 
repeated and prolonged efforts, to be endeavoring to im¬ 
press the danger of a situation upon the brain so firmly 
that it will be realized in the waking hours. This seems 
to have been the case with Thomas W. Ewing, of Pueblo, 
Colorado, a locomotive engineer employed on the Denver 
and Rio Grande railway, in 1908. Mr. Ewing’s run was 
westward from Pueblo. For several successive nights he 
dreamed of a terrible accident in which he seemed to be 
killed. So vivid and realistic were these dreams that he 
could not go to sleep again after awakening on account of 
the nervous condition they caused. He discussed the 
matter with his wife but, not believing in premonitions, 
they decided that overwork or some unknown nerve dis¬ 
order must be responsible for the remarkable dreams. On 
the day following the last of the dreams, while his locomo¬ 
tive was standing on a siding at Florence, Colorado, the 
boiler exploded, instantly killing both Ewing and his fire¬ 
man. Had the ego been endeavoring to impress upon 
the lower mind in this case the fact that the locomotive 
was in dangerous condition and picturing the consequen¬ 
ces that must soon follow if they were not avoided? It 
seems rather remarkable that a dream repeated so persist¬ 
ently and impressively should have been ignored even if 
details were not brought through into waking conscious¬ 
ness. 

A case in which the premonition did serve the purpose 
is that of Mrs. Hugh Earue, of Briceville, Tennessee. 


102 


Dreams and Premonitions 


On December 9, 1911, occurred the disastrous explosion 
in the Cross Mountain coal mine. On the next day the 
New York Herald published the following account: 

“After a terrific explosion, that shook the earth for a 
wide area, 207 men were entombed today in the Cross 
Mountain coal mine of the Knoxville Iron Company. 
Hugh Larue, a miner employed in the shaft, owes his life 
to a dream his wife had last night. When he arose this 
morning and prepared to go to his daily task Mrs. Larue 
refused to prepare his lunch for him to carry to the mines. 
She did not want him to work today. She then recited a 
dream she had. In her dream she saw scores of miners 
with their heads blown off being carried out of the mine 
entrance as she and her little children stood at the mine’s 
mouth. Larue had not missed a day from his work for 
many months, but he was prevailed upon to remain out 
of the mines. It was only a short time after Mrs. Larue 
told her story that the explosion occurred.” 

A great disaster usually furnishes several examples of 
premonitions. Where several hundred people are con¬ 
cerned it may reasonably be expected that a few among 
them are sensitive enough to be impressed with the doom 
that awaits them. The Titanic disaster furnished several 
cases, each possessing more or less evidential value, de¬ 
pendent upon circumstances and upon whether or not 
the principals involved mentioned the facts to others prior 
to the sailing of the ship. Among the strong cases is 
that of the Hon. J. Cannon Middleton. The Titanic was 
scheduled to sail April 10. It appears from the evidence 
that Mr. Middleton purchased his ticket on March 23. 
A few days later he dreamed that the great steamer was 


Premonitory Dreams 


103 


wrecked and in the dream he saw her surrounded by- 
passengers and crew swimming about her. When the 
dream recurred the following night he began to feel de¬ 
cidedly uneasy about it but said nothing, probably for fear 
of uselessly alarming his family. Fortunately for him a 
cablegram arrived six days before the ship sailed, sug¬ 
gesting a postponement of the journey on account of busi¬ 
ness conditions. Supplied now with what seemed to him 
a tangible reason he had his ticket cancelled and then told 
his wife and several friends of the dreams. The books of 
the White Star company and the cancelled ticket, which 
Mr. Middleton retains, furnish part of the evidence. 

Nobody will deny that when there is an elaboration of 
details, coincidence is an impossible explanation. If a 
dream is vague in outline and lacking in detail, and later 
something occurs that corresponds in a general way with 
the dream, we may reasonably enough dismiss it as mere 
coincidence. One dreams, let us say, that a fortune is 
inherited and soon after a relative dies bequeathing pro¬ 
perty to the dreamer; or one dreams of being seriously 
injured and later has an arm broken in a railway wreck. 
While such dreams may, or may not, be actually connected 
with the succeeding events, coincidence is a possible ex¬ 
planation. But when the dream presents a wealth of de¬ 
tails, and the following event corresponds exactly, then 
coincidence is an absurd and impossible explanation. It is 
coincidence that Mr. A., in Chicago, is telling an amusing 
story of a man whom he once saw under hypnotic influ¬ 
ence, at the same time that Mr. B., in St. Louis, is making 
himself ludicrous in a series of hypnotic antics. But it is 
impossible that every word and gesture and facial expres- 


104 


Dreams and Premonitions 


sion of Mr. B. and the man of whom Mr. A. speaks can 
be identical. Coincidence can explain the occurrence of 
two general events but never an identity of details. Now, 
it is impossible to deny that dreams sometimes forecast 
the minutest details. An acquaintance gives me the fol¬ 
lowing personal experience but without permission to use 
her name. 

“I rarely dream, but several weeks before my hus¬ 
band passed on I dreamed of his death. I seemed to be 
taken into our living room where the casket was placed 
and saw him surrounded by floral pieces bearing the cus¬ 
tomary cards. As my husband was a splendid type of 
physical strength and had never been ill, except for an 
occasional cold, the dream made little impression upon me. 
I had no confidence in the reality of any kind of dreams 
and, after casually mentioning it to an intimate friend, I 
thought no more about it. Some weeks later my husband 
contracted pneumonia and died suddenly. My dream 
came vividly before me then, for every floral piece, every 
card, and the arrangement of the room, was identical with 
the dream.” 

Every student of psychology is familiar with the fact 
that dreams are very commonly expressed in symbology. 
It is the method of the ego, apparently, and it is definitely 
expressive of the ideas to be impressed upon the lower 
mind. Attention has already been directed to the fact 
that the inner planes are nearer to reality than the phys¬ 
ical life. This symbolical language of the soul illustrates 
the point. As symbols are to words, the higher conscious¬ 
ness is to the lower. A story that would require a thou¬ 
sand of our clumsy words for its presentation may be ex- 


Premonitory Dreams 


105 


pressed very briefly by symbols. But it must not be 
supposed that because a dream is symbolical it is, there¬ 
fore, an accurate description and presents the facts with 
invariable certainty. Its reliability depends, as with any 
dream, upon the clearness of the translation in the lower 
mind and the freedom from confusion with the vibrations 
of the dense brain and its etheric counterpart. 

Sometimes people who are interested in the study of 
dreams ask if there is some code in symbology which, 
when understood, will enable one to comprehend a dream 
expressed in symbols. The fact seems to be that symbols 
convey different meanings to different people and that 
each person who dreams in that fashion attaches to the 
symbols a significance of his own. One person associates 
success, or an “all’s well” feeling, with the symbol of a 
flag; another with flowers; one knows that dark water 
signifies danger, while another sees an animal or a rep¬ 
tile as the symbol of impending danger or misfortune. Is 
it not probable the ego uses for expressing facts to 
the lower consciousness, the symbols which that particular 
person can best understand? If one has a fear of water 
that would be the line of least resistance in impressing the 
idea of coming calamity. Another may feel perfectly at 
ease when about, or in, the water but may be filled with 
apprehension at sight of a mouse or a spider. In that case 
the symbol of water would convey no warning, and serve 
no purpose in arousing and steadying the personality a- 
gainst a coming shock, while the symbol of the animal or 
the insect would. Therefore the meaning of the symbol 
varies with the temperament and experience of the indi¬ 
vidual. 


106 


Dreams and Premonitions 


A good illustration of the symbolic dream, in which 
the ego is first endeavoring to warn and fortify the lower 
mind against approaching trouble and later to impress the 
encouraging fact that the danger has passed, is contained 
in three dreams related to me by Mrs. Robert K. Walton, 
of Nordhoff, California. 

In the early part of January, 1915, she dreamed that 
while with her husband a dangling black spider appeared 
and that both of them began to fight it. Mrs. Walton had 
not been in really good health for several years but at 
the time of the dream she was in her usual health except 
for a slight fever which was thought to be the result of a 
trifling indisposition. Nothing was farther from her mind 
than the thought that the fever indicated anything serious. 
In the dream she felt the spider must be killed. Instead, 
however, it disappeared. The scene suddenly changed 
and she found herself in a new, clean room, such as spi¬ 
ders are not likely to inhabit, and she experienced a feel¬ 
ing of relief. But suddenly she became aware that instead 
of having left her when it disappeared, the loathsome in¬ 
sect was now beneath her clothing. 

This dream Mrs. Walton related to her husband in the 
morning. A few days passed and as the slight fever did 
not leave her a physician was called in. He announced at 
once that her condition was such that she must go to a 
hospital the following day. It proved to be the beginning 
of an illness which continued several months. She had 
not been long in the hospital when a large abscess formed 
and in due course, was lanced. This, and her general 
condition, gave weeks of pain and marked a distinct stage 
in her long illness. The doctor and nurse cheered her up 


Premonitory Dreams 


107 


with hopeful talk and she was looking forward to early 
recovery when the second dream occurred. 

It was now the latter part of May. Mrs. Walton 
dreamed that she w r as in a garret and thatTn passing out 
of the door she put her hand in a spider’s web. An 
enormous, vicious looking spider ran up her wrist, filling 
her with a feeling of horror. She awoke gasping with 
terror. This dream was related to the nurse with the pre¬ 
diction that it portended great trouble. The nurse made 
light of the matter, as nurses always do. But a few days 
later the doctor gently announced to the patient that a 
major operation was necessary. It followed, and for 
some weeks she was a pawn in the game played by life 
and death. Life finally won and she arose and went out 
into the world again. But meantime a third dream had 
cheered her with its forecast of the truth, and no doubt 
helped in her recovery, as the others had helped to forti¬ 
fy her against approaching trouble. 

It was only two or three days after the operation that 
the third dream occurred. Mrs. Walton dreamed that she 
was sitting in an arbor talking with her surgeon, not her 
physician. The surgeon looked about him. Overhead 
was an enormous spider. He pulled it down and flung it 
into the fire where it was consumed by the flames. It was 
the operation, notwithstanding its great danger, that finally 
closed the chapter of her suffering and now for the first 
time in fourteen years she is enjoying good health. This 
series of dreams is, I am inclined to think, one of the 
most interesting on record. A little careful study of its 
details will reveal to the student of dream lore a better 
understanding of the watchfulness of the ego over the 


108 


Dreams and Premonitions 


personality, and will indicate the extent to which helpful 
impressions would be received by everybody if they were 
more sensitive to them. 

While the more tragic things of life are usually the 
subjects of premonitions there are, of course, exceptions 
to the rule. Sometimes, when apparently the astro-physi¬ 
cal conditions are most favorable, commonplace things 
may be impressed on the brain and be clearly retained in 
the waking memory. It may occasionally descend from 
the commonplace even to the trivial. But instances in 
which only the ordinary drama of life, and that at least 
devoid of tragedy for the dreamer himself, is outlined in 
its immediate future, are fairly common. A case of this 
kind occurred recently in an eastern city. In June, 1916, 
a lady residing near me received a letter from Robert 
Donovan, of Brooklyn, N. Y., describing a premonitory 
dream. Mr. Donovan has an intimate friend whose pro¬ 
fession is teaching. His family consisted of his elderly 
parents and a sister. The sister did the housekeeping and 
looked after the parents during the absence of her brother, 
who went daily to his school. He was expecting to be mar¬ 
ried in the near future and this was well known to his 
friends. One night in March, 1916, Mr. Donovan 
dreamed that he was in conversation with his friend, the 
teacher, who told him that he would be married on May 
20. In his dream Mr. Donovan glanced at the calendar 
and, observing that May 20th came on Saturday remarked 
that it was an unusual day for a wedding. “Why don’t 
you wait till the school term has closed?” he asked his 
friend. The teacher replied that he could not do so but 
if he gave any reason the dreamer could not remember it. 


Premonitory Dreams 


109 


In the morning he related his dream to his mother who 
laughed at its improbability. Two weeks later the teach¬ 
er’s sister fell dead, and a difficult situation presented it¬ 
self. There was nobody to stay with the parents while 
the teacher was absent. In this emergency the date of 
the marriage was advanced and the teacher wrote Mr. 
Donovan that, as the result of the unexpected develop¬ 
ments, and of his professional engagements, the wedding 
would take place on Saturday, May 20. 

While the ego is undoubtedly responsible for most of 
the premonitory dreams there are apparently cases in 
which the forecast of the future may be communicated by 
some entity of the ethereal regions. There are also on 
record some cases which appear to indicate that, when the 
ego is unable to impress the lower mind, the information 
is indirectly conveyed through another person who can 
be impressed; and it would appear that this sometimes 
occurs when there is nothing more important to be re¬ 
vealed than an impending set of circumstances which may 
cause disappointment and great annoyance, the distress 
of which may be somewhat softened by the knowledge 
that it is inevitable. 

Much has been written about dreams which have en¬ 
abled students to find the solution of perplexing mathema¬ 
tical or other problems. Many stories are told of inven¬ 
tions, poems and musical compositions coming from the 
dream state and being written out immediately upon a- 
wakening. By our hypothesis the explanation may be 
either that the dreamer gets the ideas from his own less 
restricted consciousness in higher realms, or that he gets 
them from others whom he meets in the astral regions, 


110 


Dreams and Premonitions 


and, in either case, is fortunate enough to retain the mem¬ 
ory when he awakens. 

Robert Louis Stevenson, who appears to have known 
very much about the occult, tells us in Travels and Essays 
that the most original of his stories were sketched or com¬ 
posed in dreams—that he not only thus got perfect plots 
but saw it all dramatized. The dream state was appar¬ 
ently his final resort when the waking consciousness could 
not supply the necessary material. He had long tried, he 
says, to write something on dual personality, but in vain. 
Then he dreamed the essentials of The Strange Case of 
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And this was only an incident 
in many years of similar work. Olalla was “given” to 
him, he asserts, “in bulk and detail.” He says that he 
merely added the external scenery and that the moral it¬ 
self, of the story, came in the dream. 

In what degree the ego, with marvelous grasp of the 
verities of nature, might illuminate the lower mind, and 
to what extent premonitions would warn us and guide us 
if we were all highly sensitive, and responsive to the deli¬ 
cate vibrations sent down into the physical brain, it is im¬ 
possible to guess. The evidence furnished by the many 
well authenticated cases of premonitory dreams certainly 
indicates that the ego is continually endeavoring to impress 
ideas and facts upon the lower mind, but usually with 
no very great success. 

A tragedy which occurred in Salt Lake City on Aug¬ 
ust 25, 1883, was preceded by a premonitory dream that 
was, in every detail, apparently a warning of impending 
fate. It was thirty-five years after the tragic event that I 
investigated the matter but the widow of the unfortunate 


Premonitory Dreams 


111 


city marshal was still living at 660 South Sixth street, 
East, and, after hearing her story, I was able to confirm 
it and to get additional details from the file of the 
Herald and Tribune. 

It was Wednesday night, August 22, that the sleep of 
City Marshal Andrew H. Burt was so restless that his 
wife was awakened by his groans. She asked him what 
was wrong but he replied evasively, “J ust a bad dream.” 
To his companions at police headquarters, however, he 
talked freely. It was only after the tragedy that Mrs. 
Burt learned from police officers the details of the dream 
which her husband was evidently afraid would cause 
her needless alarm. The marshal had sat about silently 
a good deal for two or three days and, when pressed for an 
explanation, he told his fellow officers of the dream, 
which had apparently been very vivid. 

He said: “I thought there was a disturbance some¬ 
where on the street and we went out to see about it. 
On the way to Main Street Charlie Wilcken [a police 
officer] caught up with me and went along. We went 
to Cunnington’s corner, when a big black man came at 
me to shoot me. Charlie made a jump to save me but 
didn’t succeed and, when the fellow shot, a sensation 
passed through me giving me a shock which woke me up.” 

To Charles H. Wilcken, the police officer referred to, 
who continued to live in Salt Lake City until his death 
there in 1916, Boirt talked of the dream and seemed to 
be depressed. This was three days before the following 
events transpired. 

About two o’clock on the afternoon of Saturday, 
August 25, Mr. F. H. Grice, a restaurant keeper, tele- 


112 


Dreams and Premonitions 


phoned police headquarters that a colored man had armed 
himself and was making threats. It appears that a dis¬ 
pute had arisen over the payment for a meal at the res¬ 
taurant and the man had left threatening to return. Burt 
and Wilcken were going out to lunch when the telephone 
call came. They hurried to the scene of trouble, where 
James Harvey, a negro, was on the street armed with a 
rifle and pistol. Turning a corner, they suddenly came 
upon the negro who instanty leveled the rifle. Wilcken 
sprang at him as he fired. Burt was hit and died in a 
few minutes. Wilcken, although shot in the arm, suc¬ 
ceeded in over-powering Harvey, and disarmed him. 
Harvey was soon afterward hanged by an angry mob of 
citizens. 

In this case, it is interesting to note a slight discrep¬ 
ancy between the dream and the events that followed. 
The marshal dreamed that, on the way to the disturbance, 
Wilcken joined him. In the event he and Wilcken were 
about to leave together for lunch when the call came and 
they went from Headquarters together to the scene of 
trouble. Another interesting point is that the dream was 
so vivid that Burt was aware that his assailant-to-be was 
a negro. 

Almost never do the events exactly agree with the 
dream which foreshadows them. That is necessarily so. It 
is too much to expect that the average person will be able 
to bring a clear memory of astral consciousness into the 
waking life, with no confusions of circumstances or 
identities. It should be noted that, in the following case, 
furnished by Mrs. Jessie A. McGriff, 309 Lancaster Ter¬ 
race, Jacksonville, Florida, the circumstances were con- 


Premonitory Dreams 


113 


fused in the physical brain upon awakening and, quite 
naturally, the threatened danger is translated in the terms 
and personalities most familiar to the consciousness at the 
time of the dream. Observe too, that the dream incident 
of the barn, which had nothing to do with the actual event, 
is at the end of the dream, just before awakening. Quite 
naturally it is as the consciousness loses connection with 
the astral and returns to its physical encasement that its 
inability to hold accurately to the facts begins, and con¬ 
fusion enters. The letter, excellently descriptive of the 
unfortunate affair, is as follows: 

“One night I dreamed that my colored servant, Susie, 
came rushing upstairs to where I had put my two young 
children asleep, crying: Tm going to be killed—I’m going 
to be killed/ She rushed by my bedroom door, through 
the bathroom and back down stairs again, still shrieking 
in fearful tones that she was going to be killed. My first 
impulse was to go to her aid, then I thought of my sleep¬ 
ing children and I made the instant decision that I must 
leave Susie to her fate and protect my children. I tried 
to raise them from the bed and carry them to a place of 
safety, but my arms could not hold them, and my knees 
gave way. I was struck with that paralysis of movement 
that so often comes to us in dreams in the face of great 
danger. I called to my husband, however, who came up¬ 
stairs and together we got the children out of the house 
to a barn in the yard. But all the time I was overwhelmed 
with regret and remorse that Susie had been left to her 
fate. Toor Susie/ I kept moaning over and over. ‘The 
poor creature/ Then I paused for a moment to ask what 
the danger was that threatened, and, because all dangers 


114 


Dreams and Premonitions 


seemed to have their source in the war just then I as¬ 
sumed that the Germans had been pursuing the girl—and 
with that explanation my dream carried me a little fur¬ 
ther and I found myself trying to protect my children 
from a soldier who was trying to break into the barn. I 
awoke in terrible distress, my face wet with tears and 
moaning: ‘Poor Susie—we couldn’t save Susie.’ My 
sense of regret seemed to shake me to the depth of my 
soul. I was so upset for a while that I had to call my 
husband to my bedside, tell him the dream and beg him 
to talk of something else so that I could compose my¬ 
self. The next morning much of the horror was gone, 
but I was still so impressed that I told the dream to a 
neighbor—then forgot all about it as I make it a rule not 
to attach too much importance to such things. 

“A couple of weeks after the dream Susie left my em¬ 
ployment and in answer to an advertisement came a little 
Irish girl named Nora Casey. Although I was in great 
need of any sort of domestic help at the time, I felt averse 
to hiring her and finally told her to come to see me in the 
morning and I would tell her definitely. In the meantime, 
so strong was my aversion to taking her, I rang up the 
employment bureau the next morning and tried to have 
a girl engaged before Nora arrived—but there were none 
on hand. When Nora did come, I told her I had decided 
not to take her. She had a heavy suitcase in her hand 
and she stood looking at me with the tears in her eyes 
and said she had spent her last nickel to come to me and 
if I would only give her a chance she’d be sure to give 
me satisfaction. I was touched with her persistence and 
agreed to try her for a week only. We went out to the 


Premonitory Dreams 


115 


servant’s house in the yard to make room for her trunk 
and while there I picked up the can of gasoline I keep 
out there and showing her the big red letters on it warned 
her of what would happen if she ever made the mistake of 
putting it on the fire. She nodded as if she understood, 
but I was struck at the time with a sort of dazed look on 
her face. 

“After lunch I took the children upstairs to bathe them. 
The fire was laid in the sitting room and as I was ex¬ 
pecting company I told her to light it for me. I had 
bathed and was dressing the children in the bathroom 
when a loud explosion occurred and immediately Nora 
came shrieking upstairs—Tm burning; the house is afire 
and I’m burning.’ Into the small room she rushed like a 
mad thing, ablaze from head to foot and dropping burn¬ 
ing clothing on the floor. My first impulse was to try 
to get her into the tub and turn the water on her, but the 
children clung to my skirts yelling with fright, so, just 
as in the dream, I made the instant decision that I must 
protect the children. I thrust them behind me, and, my 
knees giving way under me, I knelt on the floor unable to 
speak or move and with the same feeling of paralysis that 
I had in the dream. I tried to rise and go into the bed¬ 
room beyond and get the bedclothes to throw over her, but 
I was unable to move or utter a sound, and with her ter¬ 
rible cry on her lips, the girl turned and ran downstairs 
and into the street where a man with an overcoat on his 
arm, threw it over her and pulled her to the ground where 
with the help of neighbors, the flames were extinguished, 
but not until the girl was so severely burned that she died 
two days later in the hospital. The scene in the bath- 


116 


Dreams and Premonitions 


room was enacted so quickly that only instant action could 
have been of any use, as she just rushed in and rushed 
out again—but during that moment I was powerless to 
act—yet generally speaking I am not uncourageous. Al¬ 
most instantly I was overwhelmed with the most terrible 
feeling of regret that I have ever known. I kept moan¬ 
ing over and over, ‘Poor Nora—oh! the poor creature. 
To think I could do nothing for her.’ Although the house 
was afire downstairs, my arms were powerless to lift the 
children through the window to the roof of the porch 
where I knew they could be rescued. I finally got down 
stairs and helped put out the fire—but I was completely 
overwhelmed with the feeling of having failed the girl 
in her need. When I went to see her afterwards in the 
hospital a few hours before she died I asked her what 
made her go down stairs and she said ‘because I knew 
I would set the children afire/ The night of the tragedy 
when I was putting the children safely to bed I remem¬ 
bered for the first time the dream and my feeling of regret 
for ‘Susie’ when I awakened was identical with what I 
was feeling then for Nora. Though there were a few dis¬ 
crepancies in the facts, the emotions and reactions were 
exactly the same. 

“The damage to the house was only slight and when we 
were clearing up the debris I picked up the bent and ex¬ 
ploded gasoline can I had warned Nora about in the 
servant’s house. She had gone straight out there, got 
the can and poured the contents on the fire in the sitting 
room. I have never been able to get over the feeling that 
the dream had some psychic significance. I still feel re¬ 
morse and regret and yet I know that there was some 


Premonitory Dreams 117 

power stronger than I preventing me from saving the 
girl’s life.” 

In the two preceding cases death seems to have been 
inevitable. There is no way in which the city marshal 
could have avoided his impending fate. He probably 
had not the remotest idea that it was so near, and may not 
have taken the dream altogether seriously. In the other 
case, the girl had no warning of death, so far as the facts 
stated enlighten us. She did have a warning about the 
deadly nature of gasoline, but the striking point in the 
narrative is the declaration that when she was shown 
the can and told what would happen if she ever used the 
contents on the fire there was “a sort of dazed look on her 
face.” Evidently the warning did not register in her con¬ 
sciousness. Later, apparently no help could come to her 
until it was too late. It reads like a case of predetermined 
doom—of what in Theosophy is known as “ripened kar¬ 
ma”—of the precipitation of forces previously generated 
into what we know as an event; but a discussion of that 
would lead us too far afield in a book devoted to the sub¬ 
ject now in hand. * 

Earlier in this chapter attention was called to the fact 
that a dream in which a tragedy is enacted does not nec¬ 
essarily mean that a tragedy will inevitably follow in phy¬ 
sical life. It may, indeed, be but a warning that may en¬ 
able one to avoid a tragedy. Two striking examples of 
such dreams follow: 

The ensuing narrative is given by Mrs. R. Jackson 
of 3020 Huntington Boulevard, Fresno, California: 

♦Those who wish to follow the matter further should read 
Elementary Theosophy by L. W. Rogers. 



118 


Dreams and Premonitions 


“I can vouch for the truth of these circumstances, re¬ 
lated to me by my mother as occurring at the time of her 
young womanhood in Henry County, Kentucky, where 
she lived. As she was born in 1822, it was not many years 
before or after 1840 although I have no recollection of 
any date being given. 

“A Mrs. Smith, who was a widow living alone on a 
farm, dreamed on successive nights that a man came and 
tried to enter her house in the night to kill her. She gave 
it no consideration the first time she dreamed about it. 
The second time caused a little uneasiness and, after the 
third dream, she became greatly alarmed. By the after¬ 
noon, she had decided that she must go to a neighbor’s 
home on the adjoining farm and tell her. The neighbor 
tried to relieve her anxiety by telling her it was only a 
dream; but Mrs. Smith replied, ‘No, someone will come.’ 
As she had live-stock to be cared for, she felt she must re¬ 
turn home and, on the following day, would arrange to 
stay there alone no longer. As she started home, the 
neighbor called her dog to them and said ‘Bull, you go 
home with Mrs. Smith and take care of her. Take good 
care of her, Bull. Don’t let anyone hurt her.’ The dog 
looked knowingly from one to the other a time or two 
and then stepped close to Mrs. Smith and, from that mo¬ 
ment, did not leave her side until she got into bed, when 
he sprang up and laid down in front of her. After an 
hour or two lying awake and uneasy, she heard a slight 
noise at the uncurtained window and saw a man gently 
raise the sash. She kept perfectly still but the dog very 
quietly put himself in a position to spring. When the 
man came near enough, the dog, without a sound, leaped 


Premonitory Dreams 


119 


upon him, seizing him by the throat and killing him in¬ 
stantly. When a light was brought, she was horrified to 
see that it was her son-in-law who lived a few miles away 
and who, it was supposed, must have planned her murder 
in order to inherit her property.” 

A very remarkable case of premonition that was clear¬ 
ly a warning is furnished by Mr. and Mrs. A. R. Koehn 
of 116 West Grant Street, Minneapolis. 

In August 1908, they lived at 3210 Fourth North Ave¬ 
nue, Minneapolis. One night, Mr. Koehn dreamed that 
his three little children, ranging in age from two to 
eight years, were playing with some children of the neigh¬ 
bor’s on the porch of a near-by house when a runaway 
team came dashing down the street and plunged into the 
porch, killing some of the children. In his dream, he saw 
them lying apparently dead upon the grass. Two days 
later, the dream having been very much in his mind, he 
found himself growing so nervous and agitated that fur¬ 
ther work seemed to be impossible. He was, at the time, 
in the service of Menter & Rosenbloom, employed as a 
collector. As the afternoon wore on, his nervous agita¬ 
tion increased to the point where he decided to return to 
his home. As he approached the place, his anxiety had 
so increased that he had unconsiously begun to run. 
Seeing his wife standing in front of the cottage, he shout¬ 
ed to her “Where are the children?” She replied calmly 
enough that they were playing on the porch of the house 
indicated, thus far confirming his dream which she had 
quite forgotten. “Call them, call them,” he shouted to 
her excitedly. Alarmed by his manner—she said in re¬ 
lating the story that she had never seen her husband in 


120 


Dreams and Premonitions 


such a state of excitement—she turned and shouted a 
peremptory order to the children to come home. They, in 
turn, surprised by her manner, sprang to their feet and 
ran home; that broke up the party. They had barely time 
to make the short journey to their home, when a runaway 
team rushed down the street without a driver. Near the 
place where the children had been playing, they met an¬ 
other team and turned aside. The heavily loaded wagon 
collided with the woodshed, knocking it from its foun¬ 
dation. That changed their course and, before they could 
stop, both of the huge animals plunged into the porch of 
the house, smashing it into fragments, overturning the 
wagon and pretty much wrecking the place. 

Understanding the hypothesis that the personality 
(that is, the self as expressed through the limitation of 
the physical brain) is directed by the ego in the degree 
permitted by one’s sensitiveness and receptivity, it is quite 
understandable that warnings occasionally come through 
into the waking consciousness and thus sometimes enable 
one to act cautiously in moments of danger. It is not so 
easy, however, to comprehend a warning given a very 
long time in advance. This is doubtless only because what 
we call “time” is largely an illusion of the physical world 
and really does not exist on inner planes as we here un¬ 
derstand time. C. W. Leadbeater, in his valuable little 
book, Dreams, says of the ego: 

. . . His measure of time and space is so entirely 
different from that which we use in waking life that from 

our view it seems as though neither time nor space existed 
for him. 


Premonitory Dreams 


121 


“I do not wish here to discuss the question, intensely 
interesting though it be, as to whether time can be said 
really to exist, or whether it is but a limitation of this low¬ 
er consciousness, and all that we call time—past, present 
and future alike—is ‘but one eternal now;’ I wish only 
to show that when the ego is freed from physical tram¬ 
mels, either during sleep, trance or death, he appears to 
employ some transcendental measure of time which has 
nothing in common with our ordinary physiological one.” 

Regardless of our inability to fully understand it, the 
fact remains that dreams often picture events that are 
a considerable distance in the future. An excellent ex¬ 
ample of this class of premonitory dreams is furnished 
by Warren B. Hill, M. D., of Milwaukee, Wis., who 
makes the following statement. Dr. Hill says: 

“In the latter part of the eighties, Mr. J. V. Cameron 
of Hesper, Iowa, who was at that time County Surveyor 
of Winneshiek County, told me this story. 

“ ‘During the battle of Shiloh, my comrade and mess¬ 
mate was shot by my side. Our relations were so inti¬ 
mate that it was a great shock to me. That night I dream¬ 
ed that I was out on a broad expanse of prairie fleeing 
from an enemy. I came to a fence and attempted to 
climb over, but when I reached the top rail, I was shot 
dead. Again I dreamed the same dream, and again was 
shot upon reaching the top rail. Immediately the dream 
repeated itself for the third time, and as I was about to 
climb the fence again, my dead comrade said to me, 
‘Don’t! They will surely shoot you. Crawl under yon¬ 
der hay stack.’ I looked where he directed and saw a 
small hay stack. 


122 


Dreams and Premonitions 


“ ‘About twenty years afterwards I took my team 
and went to North Dakota to locate some of the govern¬ 
ment land that was being thrown open to settlers. I made 
my headquarters at Pierre. One day, night overtook me 
when I was so far from Pierre that I could not get back 
and, seeing a settler’s cabin, I applied there for lodging 
for the night. There were two rough looking men in the 
cabin but no woman. 

“ ‘I slept on a cot beside a window. In the night I 
awoke with the sensation of some one being under my 
bed. I moved, and as I turned a knife came up through 
the mattress just where I had been lying. I sprang 
through the window and ran toward the barn. I came to 
a fence, and immediately I recognized the surroundings 
as those of my dream twenty years before and, as I was 
about to climb the fence, I remembered the voice of my 
comrade saying, ‘Don’t! They will surely shoot you. 
Crawl under yonder hay stack’. 

“ T looked, as I had in my dream, and saw the hay 
stack. I burrowed under it and in a little while I heard 
the men searching for me and from their conversation, 
I knew that had I attempted to climb the fence I would 
surely have been shot. 

“ ‘I ran on all that night and the next day and found 
shelter and clothing, but when I returned to Pierre my 
assailants had gotten there ahead of me, returned my 
team and reported that I had become violently insane dur¬ 
ing the night. My nerves were shaken during the experi¬ 
ence, and my daughter came out from Iowa and brought 
me home.’ ” 


Premonitory Dreams 


123 


Some writers would probably say that the foregoing 
dream should be assigned to the chapter on “Help from 
the Invisibles,” and would hold that Mr. Cameron’s dead 
comrade gave him the original warning and was also at 
hand twenty years later in the time of need; but that 
would be a rather far-fetched explanation. A simpler 
and more satisfactory analysis is that on account of the 
shock resulting from his comrade’s sudden death, Mr. 
Cameron was in the state of high nerve tension that en¬ 
abled the ego to register impressions in his physical brain 
and that advantage was taken of it to impress a most use¬ 
ful warning. In the event twenty years later, he does not 
hear his comrade speak, but the sudden facing of the 
dream scene reproduced in physical life recalls the whole 
circumstance vividly and he remembers the directions 
given in the dream and instantaneously acts upon them. 
The putting of his comrade into the dream picture as 
spokesman is natural enough. 

The ego appears to use pictures much as we use words 
in physical life and to possess remarkable powers of in¬ 
stantaneous dramatization. * 

The story of the would-be murderers that Mr. Cam¬ 
eron had suddenly become insane was, of course, the only 
way out of the dilemma when their intended victim 
escaped them. Their safety was in returning the horses 
and telling some plausible tale. 


♦See Dreams by C. W. Leadbeater, p. 37. 



























































» 












CHAPTER VIII 


DREAMS OF THE DEAD 

Perhaps there is no direction in which the correct 
understanding of dreams is so useful as in relation to 
our departed friends. Anything that can in some degree 
lessen the sorrow caused by their absence is certainly 
worthy of careful study. * 

As a matter of fact the so-called dead are not dead 
at all, but they are none the less separated from the living 
or, to put it more accurately, the living are separated from 
their friends who have passed away; but only because, 
during the waking hours the consciousness is confined to 
the physical brain, which is both its instrument and its 
limitation. During the waking hours the human being 
is functioning through his astral body plus his physical 
body, the latter being surrounded and interpenetrated by 
the matter of the former. When he falls asleep the 
dense body is left behind. He is then functioning through 
his astral body, which is what the mis-named dead are 
also doing. The living and the “dead” are, therefore, 
again together. If, fortunately, the bereaved person re¬ 
members it in the morning, he thinks he has had a dream. 

Now, since dreams are of two kinds—memories of 


*To Those Who Mourn , by C. W. Leadbeater, deals very practi¬ 
cally with the subject of death. It is a pamphlet, and will be sent 
by the Theosophical Press, Chicago, on receipt of 5c in stamps. 





126 


Dreams and Premonitions 


astral experiences and memories of impressions caused by 
the automatic activity of the physical brain and its etheric 
counterpart—this memory of the departed may be either 
the one or the other. If the dream is the memory of an 
astral experience, a visit to the one who has passed on, 
it is likely to be vivid and realistic. In such cases the expe¬ 
rience is life-like, time passes joyously and the dreamer 
often awakens with a feeling of blissful exaltation, for 
he has really been with the loved one and the joy he has 
felt is reflected in the waking consciousness. Unfortun¬ 
ately, with the person who does not understand the facts 
as they are, this uplifting emotion is immediately quenched 
by the gloomy belief that it is all a phantasy of the brain. 

Such belief and mood are unfortunate for more than 
one reason. They prevent the dreamer cultivating the art 
of bringing the memory of such association more fully 
into the waking state, while the depression of the be¬ 
reaved person acts disastrously upon the one who is 
mourned as dead and lost. It is, of course, natural that 
the belief that one is separated from those he loves for 
the remainder of this life should cause great sorrow. If 
the fact were known that the separation is only on the 
part of the one who remains behind, and that that is con¬ 
fined to the hours of waking consciousness, the grief 
would be greatly modified. To know that whether we 
remember it or not, whether we dream or do not dream, 
we are always with the departed during the hours of sleep, 
if there is an attracting tie of love between us, would 
soon bring permanent serenity instead of the hopeless de¬ 
spair that is so common and so unfortunate for everybody 
concerned. Depressing emotions are bad enough for the 




Dreams of the Dead 


127 


living but very much worse for those for whom they 
mourn. As the physical body is the instrument of action, 
the astral body is the vehicle of emotion. In the waking 
state an emotion arises in the astral body and passes out¬ 
ward into the physical mechanism, a large percentage of 
its energy being exhausted in setting the physical parti¬ 
cles in motion. Consequently emotions are very much 
keener in the astral life than in the physical. It is no 
exaggeration to say that a given cause will produce a very 
great deal more of either joy or sorrow in the astral life 
than in the physical. Therefore when bereaved people 
give way to unrestrained sorrow and despair they are do¬ 
ing the worst thing possible for their departed friends. 

We have only to reflect upon the fact that we are all 
more or less affected by the elation and the depression of 
people about us to understand that emotions are conta¬ 
gious. Persons who habitually indulge that form of de¬ 
pression commonly known as “the blues” are injuriously 
affecting all who come near them in proportion to the 
sensitiveness of their victims. Life may thus be made 
quite miserable for those who are extremely sensitive. 
Multiply that effect many times and it will give some 
idea of the disastrous results to their “dead” friends of 
the grief and despair of which they are the helpless cause. 
Such mourning, in the last analysis, is not on account of 
any fate that awaits them but is caused by their sense of 
personal loss; and when we reflect upon the fact that such 
grief on our part brings still greater sorrow to them the 
value of a knowledge of the facts becomes apparent. 

There is but one sensible attitude to assume toward 



128 


Dreams and Premonitions 


those who have passed on. We should think of them as 
cheerfully as possible and never with longing regret and 
the desire that they should be with us again. They are 
with us every night that we sleep and a little patient con¬ 
sideration of that fact will be likely to bring to most peo¬ 
ple an increasing serenity and joy. 

If people were better able to bring accurate memories 
of astral experiences into the waking life it would no 
doubt often be a great consolation to those who have 
passed over to the other life as well as to the dreamer. 
There are a number of cases on record in which those who 
have passed on suddenly, without leaving full informa¬ 
tion about their affairs behind them, have endeavored for 
a long time to pass such knowledge back before they suc¬ 
ceeded. Who shall say how many never succeed at all? 
The Reeves Snyder case and the Moore case, in Chapter 
III, are examples of the recovery of valuables which, es¬ 
pecially in the Moore case, would probably have been 
forever lost to the surviving relatives but for the fortun¬ 
ate dream. It was more than two years after the death 
of Mr. Moore that the buried coin was recovered. Who 
can guess how long he had been endeavoring to reveal 
the hiding place of the little fortune to his wife and what 
he suffered by the long delay, and the fear that his fail¬ 
ure to impart the information at the time the money was 
secreted might be the cause of continued poverty? 

Very much of the heartache caused by death would 
disappear if the truth about the “dead” were known and 
the facts about sleep and dreams were understood. The 
least that we can do for our part is to recognize the re- 


Dreams of the Dead 


129 


lationship that exists in consciousness between our de¬ 
parted friends and ourselves and, by study of the facts 
and by serious efforts at the control of the mind and the 
emotions, bring about the conditions that will enable us 
to get much consolation from the truth instead of remain¬ 
ing ignorant of it. 



CHAPTER IX 


HOW TO REMEMBER DREAMS 

For the same reason that it is possible to evolve into 
higher development any faculty or quality which we pos¬ 
sess it is also possible to cultivate the art of bringing the 
memory of our experiences during sleep through into the 
waking consciousness. But it is of little use for one to at¬ 
tempt it unless one is willing to devote considerable time 
and thought to it. There is no mystic process by which it 
can be instantaneously accomplished. We are all familiar 
with the fact that muscular strength can be developed by 
almost everybody. But it requires time and attention. A 
little effort will result in a little muscular gain. But if 
a man has the ambition to become an athlete he must be 
willing to put forth patient and long continued exertion 
in developing physical strength; and just so it is in the 
matter of evolving the control of the mechanism of con¬ 
sciousness. A little attention to it will be of some value, 
but one who would fully succeed must resolve in advance 
to work faithfully at the task. 

It seems to be the order of nature that, at the level of 
evolution represented by the average human being, the 
activities of consciousness in the waking state, and those 
of the wider consciousness of the astral realm, shall be 
separate existences. But as evolution proceeds, and the 
lessons which can best be learned in the limited physical 
consciousness are largely acquired, the separating walls 


132 


Dreams and Premonitions 


slowly dissolve, and ultimately the two states of conscious¬ 
ness are merged in one. When a person has evolved far 
enough for that happy consummation he no longer 
“sleeps” in the ordinary meaning of the word. His phys¬ 
ical body sleeps, but to his consciousness there is no pe¬ 
riod of apparent oblivion. He is conscious of lying down 
to sleep, conscious of his physical body lying on the bed 
as he moves away from it in his astral body, conscious of 
all that he sees and hears and does in the ethereal regions 
during the night, and conscious of his return to his phys¬ 
ical body when, in the morning, he takes it up for the 
activities of the material world once more. His advance 
in evolution has united the separated fragments that he 
has called days into a continuous whole, and night has 
ceased to exist for him, just as it would if one could travel 
rapidly enough to keep always in sight of the sun. 

That, however, marks a fairly high stage in human 
evolution, and those who have reached it are likely to 
have evolved very desirable mental and moral qualities. 
The rest of us can at least approximate it, with the re¬ 
quisite effort, and can acquire a sufficient degree of con¬ 
trol of the mind and the emotions to bring much more of 
the astral experiences into the daily life. Those who are 
willing to take the trouble, and who will be patient and 
persevering, can have personal proof of the truth of this. 

The first step is to control the process of thinking dur¬ 
ing the waking hours. Most people let the mind wander 
idly from one thing to another. The current of their 
thought is directed almost wholly by external things. 
When the mind is not thus stimulated to action it is likely 


Hoiu to Remember Dreams 


133 


to get its initiative, quite unconsciously of course, from 
the mental activity of others in their vicinity—the va¬ 
grant thoughts which drift through the brain. Such pas¬ 
sive indifference to mental control is fatal to the exten¬ 
sion of consciousness. One must learn to think about 
what one is thinking, and acquire the habit of controlling 
one’s thoughts. When one begins thus to turn the con¬ 
sciousness back upon itself there comes the opportunity 
for the ego to make its influence felt in the lower mind. 
Gradually the mind can thus be brought under control and 
the connection between the two states of consciousness 
be strengthened. The truth in that is obvious. Every 
thoughtful person knows that much thinking about any 
subject brings knowledge of that subject. It is undoubt¬ 
edly the natural order of things that the ego, which is 
the true self, is constantly endeavoring to impress the 
brain consciousness, and the degree of success must neces¬ 
sarily be dependent upon the stability of the lower mind. 

There are two ways in which the mind receives im¬ 
pressions during sleep—from within and from without. 
The former are from the ego, and the latter are the vibra¬ 
tions set up by contact with others’ vagrant thoughts, or 
are the automatic action of the brain reproducing its 
own thought images of the day. If the mind is thus occu¬ 
pied there is little probability that it will be susceptible 
to the unaccustomed vibrations from the ego. Only when, 
through thought control during the waking hours, the 
mind has become responsive to the higher influences, will 
there be anything from the sleeping state worth remem¬ 
bering. It then becomes possible for it to register the 
higher vibrations instead of initiating the lower ones. 


134 


Dreams and Premonitions 


But mind control alone is not enough. There must 
also be control of the emotions. The waking thoughts 
and emotions have a powerful and determining influence 
upon the activities of the consciousness during the hours 
when the physical body is asleep. The trivial in thought 
and the gross in emotion are foreign to the ego and widen 
the gulf that separates the lower mind from it. The 
work in hand is to establish the closest possible connec¬ 
tion between the two, and success will depend largely 
upon the extent to which the daily life can be brought 
into harmony with the life of the ego. Therefore serenity 
of mind and purity of emotions must be cultivated. 

While it is important to have this desirable state of 
mind maintained throughout the waking hours, there is 
perhaps no other moment of them all that is so essential to 
success as the instant of falling asleep at night. It seems 
that the last thought, as one sinks into slumber, has an 
influence out of all proportion to the time it occupies the 
mind. By it the trend appears to be given to the mental 
and emotional activities of the night. If the thought is 
a sensuous one it seems to attract its gross affinities from 
its environment, and the mind becomes impervious to 
higher things. But if the mind is deliberately set upon 
a pure and lofty theme, as one falls asleep, the channel is 
open for impressions from the ego which may be recalled 
upon awakening. 

If we reflect a moment upon the fact that there can / 
be no memory of an astral experience unless the delicate 
vibrations of astral matter have made their impress upon j 
the physical brain, we shall see at once the necessity for 
the most tranquil and favorable conditions in the lower 


How to Remember Dreams 


135 


mind. Worry, and all other forms of mental and emo¬ 
tional disturbance, should be absent. 

As the instant of sinking into slumber is important 
so, too, that of awakening is another golden moment to be 
improved. We are then nearest to the conscious activi¬ 
ties of the night, and it is the most propitious time for 
recalling them. The delicate traces of the astral vibra¬ 
tions are then at their best, but when the physical plane 
vibrations begin to sweep through the brain the astral im¬ 
pressions may soon be obliterated. One may write on 
the smooth sand at the seashore, and it is perfectly legible 
at the time; but when the tide comes in the boisterous 
waves erase it and not a trace remains. And so it is with 
the astral record on the physical brain. The vibrations of 
the workaday world ordinarily erase them unless they 
are the record of something that has deeply moved us. 
Hence the necessity of a little quiet retrospection at the 
moment of awakening, before the mind has been turned 
to the business of the waking hours. 

But while what we can thus recall will help to hold 
the memory of our astral activities, it is not usually suffi¬ 
cient to anchor it securely in the waking consciousness 
and, though we may have a vivid recollection when we 
first awaken, it is extremely likely gradually to fade out 
until, instead of being able to remember the event, we 
can only remember that there was something we wished 
to remember, while every detail of it has vanished in obliv¬ 
ion ! Let the reader try the experiment and he will soon 
discover that the instances in which he can remember 
throughout the day the dream incidents that were clear in 


136 


Dreams and Premonitions 


the morning do not constitute the rule, but the exceptions 
to it. 

Now, it is not only the bringing through of the mem¬ 
ory into the waking state, but also the retention of the 
memory that assists one in uniting the two states of con¬ 
sciousness. Means should therefore be employed of an¬ 
choring the astral experiences firmly in the mind. This is 
not so difficult as would at first appear, as the method by 
which it is accomplished is very simple. It consists mere¬ 
ly of writing down the memory upon awakening. If a 
pad of paper and pencil are left the night before on a 
stand within easy distance one will soon form the habit of 
reaching for them with the first gleam of physical con¬ 
sciousness. Indeed, the writing is so frequently begun 
before the consciousness is in full possession of the phys¬ 
ical body that the lines are often difficult to read after¬ 
ward; but the more immediately it is begun the better. 
In advance of the experiment it will not seem probable to 
the beginner that merely having recorded the memory will 
enable him to retain it if he could not rememebr it with¬ 
out the memorandum. He will find by experience, how¬ 
ever, that with the notes he can readily recall it all, while 
without them he is quite helpless. 

The probability of success in recalling the experiences 
of the night upon awakening in the morning can be greatly 
increased by resolving before falling asleep the night be¬ 
fore that the moment the waking consciousness returns 
the memorandum will be made. This pre-resolution may 
also be used to determine what one shall do during the 
night in the astral regions. It would appear from care¬ 
ful clairvoyant investigations of the matter, that when 


How to Remember Dreams 


137 


a person strongly resolves before going to sleep that he 
will enter upon a certain course of action he is extremely 
likely to do so. In this way one may begin to make his 
nights, as well as his days, useful to others and to him¬ 
self. He may visit and encourage the ill and the de- 
spondents among his living friends and, after sufficient 
experience, he may have the satisfaction of not only bring¬ 
ing the memory of it through into the waking hours, but 
also of being able to establish the truth of it by material 
evidence. One of the simple methods by which this is 
sometimes done is to write down in the morning a detailed 
description of some place one has visited often during the 
sleeping state, but has never seen, or to note the changes 
that have occurred in some place he has seen—as new 
buildings erected or trees cut down—and then to verify it 
all by physically traveling to the place and inspecting it. 

If the experimenter is in earnest, and is diligent in his 
efforts to control his mind and emotions, he will in good 
time achieve at least some degree of success, and that 
should furnish the motive for farther progress. But he 
should never fall into the error of believing that because 
he is beginning to understand the rationale of dreams 
and is acquiring some accuracy in remembering astral ex¬ 
periences he may therefore safely use his dream conscious¬ 
ness as a guide in physical plane affairs. Of course if 
there should come to him some warning premonition he 
will use his common sense in determining what, if any¬ 
thing, he will do. Biut it would be folly to subordinate 
the reason to astral impressions and thus set aside sober 
judgment in deciding upon a course of action. Only when 
one has succeeded in unifying the physical and astral life 


138 


Dreams and Premonitions 


to the point where he has no break of consciousness at all 
when the body sleeps, can he be certain that he may not 
bring back to the waking state a confused memory. He 
may, or he may not, correctly translate the astral experi¬ 
ences in the physical brain. He may study the phenome¬ 
na and he may steadily extend the horizon of his con¬ 
sciousness ; but since he cannot positively know whether 
his memory of a premonition is accurate until the event 
has occurred, it is obvious that he can only use it for 
what it may be worth as a suggestion. 

An extended discussion of the details of the dream 
state is beyond the limits of this little volume but there 
is one characteristic error of translation that deserves at¬ 
tention. The dreamer, by sympathetic association, often 
merges his consciousness with that of another whom he 
is observing. Let us say that while in the dream state he 
sees an accident. A switchman is run down by a locomo¬ 
tive and an arm is cut off. The dreamer upon awakening 
recalls the scene with himself as chief actor in the acci¬ 
dent and, as he remembers it, his own arm was severed. 
This sympathetic substitution is one of the well established 
points in dream translation and the student of the sub¬ 
ject often finds corroboration of the fact in the public 
prints. A case in point is the dream of Mrs. Anderson 
mentioned in Chapter III. Only brief reference is there 
made to it but the press reports at the time quoted Mrs. 
Anderson as saying, “On Thursday morning I had that 
awful dream. I dreamed we were arguing over papers 
and I thought I was his wife and would not sign. Then 
he grabbed me, raised his hand and struck me with a 
knife.” Such substitution seems to be common with un- 


How to Remember Dreams 


139 


trained observers. One may possibly dream of seeing 
himself in his own coffin, only because he has in reality 
seen the funeral of another. Only when he becomes skill¬ 
ful in bringing the memory of his astral experiences 
through into the waking state can he be certain that no 
errors are involved. 

The element of time is also a cause of confusion. 
When one has a premonition there is often not the slight¬ 
est clue to indicate exactly when the event may be ex¬ 
pected to occur. This may very possibly be because only 
fragments of the vision have been brought through into 
the brain memory. But whatever the cause the fact re¬ 
mains that the event foreseen may occur the next day or 
may perhaps be far in the future. It is therefore often 
impossible to base any action upon the information. Such 
fragmentary and indefinite information is in the same 
class with the forecast of the future so commonly fur¬ 
nished by the untrained clairvoyant or psychic. It may 
contain some truth and yet be absolutely inadequate as a 
basis of action. The point may be illustrated by the ex¬ 
perience of one of my friends. He was told that there 
was a very desirable position for him at the state capitol 
which he was to fill. This information came to him at a 
time when his fortunes were at low tide and he was much 
in need, not so much of “a very desirable position,” as of 
any employment at all that might be secured. Filled with 
high hope he made the long journey, went to the capitol 
building and exhausted every possibility that would lead 
to the fulfillment of the prophecy. The result was failure 
and disappointment. Several years later he was caught 
up in a popular political movement and was elected lieu- 


140 


Dreams and Premonitions 


tenant-governor of the state. He then went to the capi¬ 
tal building for a term of office and the vision of the clair¬ 
voyant was justified by the fact. 

Among the similar cases that have come under my 
observation is that of a mining prospector and his part¬ 
ner who were told that great wealth was ahead of them 
and they went rejoicing to their work. Years of the most 
commonplace experience followed in which, like thou¬ 
sands of other gold seekers, they managed barely to ex¬ 
ist. Finally one of them became discouraged and dis¬ 
gusted and abandoned the enterprise. The other man 
leased and worked small claims for several more years 
when, quite unexpectedly, a “pocket” was uncovered and 
he retired with considerable wealth. Whether or not the 
clairvoyant really foresaw this denouement the informa¬ 
tion, as in the instance above given, was misleading. 
Thousands of people are continually following the advice 
of pseudo-psychics to their sorrow, quite overlooking the 
fact that, although the predictions may often contain much 
truth, physical affairs cannot usually be directed by them. 
Precisely so it is with dreams. Their utility lies chiefly 
in the fact that they disclose to us the real nature of hu¬ 
man consciousness. They sometimes give a useful warn¬ 
ing, and often furnish much consolation, but, because 
it is usually impossible for the average person to bring 
them through into the waking consciousness with accu¬ 
racy, they can be profitably acted upon only when due 
allowance has been made for their fragmentary nature. 


INDEX 


Page 

Alvord case, The . 42 

Anderson’s, Mrs., dream . 49 

Ansonia Hotel case . 67 

Auld case, The . 45 

Bellman case, The. 44 

Bjorn case, The . 72 

Brintnell case, The. 81 

Burt case, The .110, 111, 112 

Cameron case, The.121, 122 

Cases of inevitable death.117 

Cases of premonitory warnings .117, 119 

Casey case, The .112 

Clairvoyance . 6 

Clairvoyant investigations . 67 

Classes of dreams .3, 5, 18, 56, 57, 59 

Classification of dreams . 59. 

Coincidence .103 

Complex conditions . 63 

Control of emotions .134 

Controlling thoughts .132 

Death ..14, 15 

Devries case, The. 73 

Dill case, The . 51 

Dreamer, The ...9, 17 

Dreams . 18 



























Dream about Prohibition Speech .25, 26 

Dreams, fragmentary nature of . 63 

Dreams of discovery. 37 

Dreams of the dead ..5, 8, 125, 126 

Ego, The .59, 60, 65 

Ego’s measure of time and space .120 

Ewing case, The .101 

Failure of materialistic hypothesis .19, 20, 24 

Falling asleep and awakening..135 

Foreordination and free will. 60 

Fragmentary dreams .139, 140 

Grace case, The . 97 

Greene case, The . 50 

Henley-Parker case, The . 74 

How to remember dreams .131 

Hypothesis, The .10, 11 

Importance of time element.139, 140 

Inadequate explanations ..19, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 30, 32 

Incomplete dreams. 64 

Ingersoll, Col. R. G., quoted. 66 

Interpenetration.11, 16 

Jackson-Smith case, The .118 

Journeys in astral body. 67 

Kauffman case, The . 47 

Kitchens case, The . 90 

Koehn case, The.119 

Larue case, The .101, 102 

Lillis case, The . 73 

Lincoln’s dreams .93, 94, 95, 96 

Lodge, Sir Oliver, quoted. 62 































Magnetic connection . 67 

Man’s bodies .12, 13, 15 

Materialistic interpretation .4, 5 

Memories of astral experiences . 65 

Message about grieving. 85 

Messina earthquake case . 76 

Middleton case, The .102 

Minute details in dream .104 

Modern psychology . 5 

Moods, their importance.127 

Moore case, The . 40 

Murderers, their dream terror . 70, 71 

Nature of man ...10, 17 

Palmer-Batchelder case, The. 99 

Pomerene case, The . 76 

Premonition of death of another.112, 113 

Premonition of the commonplace.108, 109 

Premonitory dreams . 94 

Premonitions . 65 

Reason for premonitions .100 

Reeves-Snyder case. 37 

Retention of dream memories .136 

Reynolds case, The . 86 

Richet, Prof. Charles, quoted . 62 

San Francisco earthquake case, A. 96 

Scientific research *. 9 

Shaw-Hay case, The. 82 

Sleep and death .13, 17 

Sources of impressions in sleep .133 

Subconscious .. • • • 4 
































Subliminal self .... 4 

Substitution of personality .138, 139 

Stevenson’s dreams .110 

Sutton case, The . 89 

Symbolical dreams.104, 105, 106 

Telepathy .21, 22, 23, 24 

Titanic disaster, The.102 

Tuttle case .68, 70 

Varieties of Dreams.55, 56 

Vote case, The. 52 

Walton case, The .106 

Wilkins case, The .48, 138 

















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